Scene based nonuniformity correction based on block ergodicity for infrared focal plane arrays

This paper puts forward a new scene based nonuniformity correction algorithm for IRFPA. This method adopts phase-correlation method for motion estimation and takes the sum of mean-square errors of the pixel brightness between several adjacent frames as the cost function when the brightness constancy assumption between two adjacent frames is satisfied. Nonuniformity correction parameters could be estimated by minimizing such cost function. In order to reduce calculation quantity, we can divide these images into several subblocks, and solve for the optimum solution of the cost function respectively in each subblock. From the analysis, it is shown that the optimum solution is of global uniqueness when all the elements in subblocks could satisfy the ergodicity condition. Then the estimated value of nonuniformity correction parameters could be deduced by minimizing the cost functions. The nonuniformity correction experiments for both infrared image sequence with simulated nonuniformity and infrared imagery with real nonuniformity show that the proposed algorithm could achieve a great correction effect by only analyzing a small number of frames.