Adaptive enhancement of sea surface targets in infrared high dynamic range image

Abstract

A high dynamic range infrared image of the sea surface scene includes the effects due to the sea clutter, mirror reflections from the wave facets, which decrease the visibility of the ship targets and their details. This paper provides an efficient adaptive enhancement technique for ship targets based on bilateral filtering and visual saliency detection. The 14-bit raw image is separated into a detail layer and a base layer by applying an adaptive bilateral filter. Then the two layers are processed separately and added afterward. Hereafter by employing visual saliency detection we can get the gain matrix to improve the contrast of ship targets. Finally, the image whose contrast is improved is quantized to the display range. The strength of our proposed method lies in its ability to inhibit the sea clutter and adaptability in different sea surface scene and shows a better performance in the contrast of the ship targets and the visibility of their details.