Image visualization for infrared cameras using radiometry

Seçkin Özsaraç

doi:10.1117/12.2518918

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14 May 2019 Image visualization for infrared cameras using radiometry

Seçkin Özsaraç

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Proceedings Volume 11001, Infrared Imaging Systems: Design, Analysis, Modeling, and Testing XXX; 110010K (2019) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2518918
Event: SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing, 2019, Baltimore, Maryland, United States

Abstract

Infrared (IR) cameras typically output single channel frames with 13-16 bit dynamic range. On the other hand, typical Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) monitors can display three channel frames with only 8 bit dynamic range. Therefore, visualization of IR images while preserving details is a challenging task for utilizing the full potential of thermal cameras. In this paper, we propose a radiometry based method for converting 13-16 bit IR images to 8 bit single channel images for visualization purposes, which is called temperature quantizer. In the proposed method, we use the histogram of the calibrated temperature values. In this context, we collected data using an uncooled Long Wave IR (LWIR), a cooled Middle Wave IR (MWIR) and a cooled LWIR camera. The proposed method is compared with a basic min-max scaler and a Digital Number (DN) quantizer that uses raw image histogram. For quantitative comparison, we used standard deviation and entropy values. Experiments show that the proposed method performs better than the reference methods quantitatively and qualitatively.

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Seçkin Özsaraç "Image visualization for infrared cameras using radiometry", Proc. SPIE 11001, Infrared Imaging Systems: Design, Analysis, Modeling, and Testing XXX, 110010K (14 May 2019); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2518918

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