Kernel based color estimation for night vision imagery

Displaying night vision (NV) imagery with colors can largely improve observer's performance of scene recognition and situational awareness comparing to the conventional monochrome representation. However, estimating colors for single-band NV imagery has two challenges: deriving an appropriate color mapping model and extracting sufficient image features required by the model. To address these, a kernel based regression model and a set of multi-scale image features are used here. The proposed method can automatically render single-band NV imagery with natural colors, even when it has abnormal luminance distribution and lacks identifiable details.