Degradation in LED night vision imaging and recovery algorithms

The LED night vision imaging detection has been widely used in many fields, such as vehicle mounted night vision auxiliary driving system and urban surveillance. The LED array as light source has advantages of low costs and small size. However, due to the influence of atmospheric turbulence, absorption and scattering by aerosol particles, and the limitation of imaging equipment, image quality is severely degraded. Therefore, the presented effort calculated the modulation transfer function (MTF) of degradation through the quantization of light beam transmitting in the night air as well as the influence of atmospheric turbulence and aerosol. Using the degradation model as priori knowledge, the target image is recovered by model-based image processing algorithms, results of which are compared and evaluated. The experimental results verified the effectiveness of the proposed degradation model for LED night vision imaging.