A new detail enhancement method for high dynamic range infrared image

Due to the width limitation of 8-bit data used in traditional display device, the local details and contrast of the infrared image are compressed. To cope with these limitations, a novel infrared image enhancement method based on CLAHE and multi-scale approach of DoG is proposed. First, the guided image filter is utilized to separate the base layer and detail layer of the image. Then, the improved CLAHE is used to adjust the base layer global contrast and the multi-scale detail boosting is used to enhance the detail features; for the detail layer, multi-scale fast median filter is used for noise reduction. Finally, the two layers are fused according to the weight of the detail layers' noise level. Comparing with the real-time enhancement methods both in qualitative and quantitative aspects, our proposed method shows the better performance in experiment results. (paper)