Infrared Weak Small Target Image Enhancement Method

Infrared dim small target image enhancement is a very importantpretreatment in automatic recognition of target(ART) and infrared targettracking system. The contrast of dim small target in Infrared image islow, the noise is strong, and some characteristics of target and noise aresame, these made next processing such as recognition, extraction,detection, and tracking of target difficult. So enhancing infrared imagewhich contain dim small target is important and meaningful.Infrared dim small target image enhancement was researched from threeaspects, boosting the contrast of infrared image, suppressing noise andenhancing the color of image. The basic concept of image enhancement wasintroduced, the principle and the characteristics of infrared imaging wasresearched. First, the cause of image noise and the characteristic oftarget in image was analysed. Then some common used algorithm wasresearched and analysed, such as method based on histogram, intensitytransformation, space filter, and method based on mathematicalmorphology. In the aspect of noise suppression, the advantage anddisadvantage of smoothing filter and median filter was analysed. Atlast, the pseudocolor enhancement of infrared dim small target image wasresearched. Experiment result had shown that the vision effect and thedefinition of enhanced image was improved.