Xuelian Yu

Scene-based nonuniformity correction using multiframe registration and iteration method

In this paper, an improved scene-based nonuniformity correction (NC) algorithm for infrared focal plane arrays (IRFPAs) using multiframe registration and iteration method is proposed. This method estimates the global translation and iterates between several adjacent frames. Then mean square error between any two properly registered images is minimized to obtain nonuniformity correction parameters. The detailed method includes three main steps: First, we assume that brightness along the motion trajectory is constant, and a linear detector response and model the nonuniformity of each detector with a gain and a bias. Second, several adjacent frames are used to compute relative motion of any two adjacent frames. Here we use the Fourier shift theorem, their relative translation can be obtained by calculating their normalized cross-power spectrum. We choose K adjacent frames, so the total number of iteration is K*(K-1)/2. Then the mean square error function is defined as the corresponding difference between the two adjacent corrected frames, and it is minimized making use of the least mean square algorithm. The use of correlation of adjacent frames sufficiently, together with iteration strategy between them, can get fast and reliable fixed-pattern noise reduction with low few ghosting artifacts. We define the algorithm and present a number of experimental results to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method in comparison to several previously published methods. The performance of the proposed method is thoroughly evaluated with clean infrared image sequences with synthetic nonuniformity and real infrared imagery.

An infared polarization image fusion method based on NSCT and fuzzy C-means clustering segmentation algorithms

The integration between polarization and intensity images possessing complementary and discriminative information has emerged as a new and important research area. On the basis of the consideration that the resulting image has different clarity and layering requirement for the target and background, we propose a novel fusion method based on non-subsampled Contourlet transform (NSCT) and fuzzy C-means (FCM) segmentation for IR polarization and light intensity images. First, the polarization characteristic image is derived from fusion of the degree of polarization (DOP) and the angle of polarization (AOP) images using local standard variation and abrupt change degree (ACD) combined criteria. Then, the polarization characteristic image is segmented with FCM algorithm. Meanwhile, the two source images are respectively decomposed by NSCT. The regional energy-weighted and similarity measure are adopted to combine the low-frequency sub-band coefficients of the object. The high-frequency sub-band coefficients of the object boundaries are integrated through the maximum selection rule. In addition, the high-frequency sub-band coefficients of internal objects are integrated by utilizing local variation, matching measure and region feature weighting. The weighted average and maximum rules are employed independently in fusing the low-frequency and high-frequency components of the background. Finally, an inverse NSCT operation is accomplished and the final fused image is obtained. The experimental results illustrate that the proposed IR polarization image fusion algorithm can yield an improved performance in terms of the contrast between artificial target and cluttered background and a more detailed representation of the depicted scene.