New technique for dynamic-range compression and contrast enhancement in infrared imaging systems

Dynamic range compression and detail enhancement are two important issues for effectively displaying high dynamic range infrared (IR) images on standard dynamic range monitors. Sophisticated techniques are required in order to improve the visibility of the details without introducing distortions. A novel method was introduced for visualization of IR images. The proposed method was composed of two cascaded steps. In the first step, dynamic range compression of infrared images was posed as an quadratic optimization problem that minimize a cost function. In the second step, the detail was enhanced by an specifically designed exponential factor that provided excellent detail visibility and avoid halo artifacts. The performance of the proposed technique was evaluated using a data set of IR images collected from different operating conditions. The results show that the proposed method is insensitive to features occurring in IR image and yield the most visually pleasing outputs. Compared with other algorithms, it can effectively improve the overall contrast, prevent over-enhancement of flat regions and reduce noise visibility.