Performance evaluation of image enhancement techniques on a digital image-intensifier

Judith Dijk; Piet Bijl; Henri Bouma

doi:10.1117/12.820002

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22 April 2009 Performance evaluation of image enhancement techniques on a digital image-intensifier

Judith Dijk, Piet Bijl, Henri Bouma

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Proceedings Volume 7300, Infrared Imaging Systems: Design, Analysis, Modeling, and Testing XX; 73000F (2009) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.820002
Event: SPIE Defense, Security, and Sensing, 2009, Orlando, Florida, United States

Abstract

Recently new techniques for night-vision cameras are developed. Digital image-intensifiers are becoming available on the market. Also, so-called EMCCD cameras are developed, which may even be able to record color information about the scene. However, in low-light situations all night-vision imagery becomes noisy. In this paper we evaluate the performance of image enhancement techniques for one type of noisy night imagery, that is a digital image-intensifier. The image enhancement techniques tested are noise reduction, super-resolution reconstruction and local adaptive contrast enhancement. The results show that image enhancement techniques improve the usage of image-intensifiers in low-light conditions. The largest improvement is found for super-resolution reconstruction applied at the smallest objects. This indicates that part of the improvement is obtained by resolution enhancement. Applying LACE does not change the performance, indicating that in this setup LACE performs equal to the automatic gain control of the image-intensifier.

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Judith Dijk, Piet Bijl, and Henri Bouma "Performance evaluation of image enhancement techniques on a digital image-intensifier", Proc. SPIE 7300, Infrared Imaging Systems: Design, Analysis, Modeling, and Testing XX, 73000F (22 April 2009); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.820002

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