Infrared image enhancement using polarization imaging

Since the low contrast and lack of details in infrared imagery, a polarization imaging based enhancement method was proposed. Fusing the infrared polarization image and intensity image, this infrared image enhancement approach made the target areas prominent. Firstly, the polarization imaging theory was analyzed, and then polarization images were obtained using the polarization imaging technology. Secondly, the information of polarization images could be well acquired with the help of Shearlets based multi-scale image decomposition. Finally, the enhanced fused result was got with region feature matching. To test the effectiveness of this method, experimental device was built to get real images. Compared with original image, both the subjective and objective evaluation results indicate that the enhanced images have much more image details and polarization information, which is useful for target detection and recognition.