Infrared image enhancement through saliency feature analysis based on multi-scale decomposition

•Multi scale decomposition is constructed using images smoothing filter.•Saliency features are extracted using local frequency-tuned method.•The region of interest could be enhanced with saliency map at various scales.•Using adjustable synthetic weights, the target regions could be further enhanced.

To improve contrast between dim target region and background in infrared (IR) long-range surveillance, this paper proposes a fast image enhancement approach using saliency feature extraction based on multi-scale decomposition. Firstly, a smooth based multi-scale decomposition is designed and applied to original infrared image, generating sub-images with various frequency components at different decomposition levels. The dim target regions of sub-images are extracted by a local frequency-tuned based saliency feature detection method, secondly. With saliency maps created by saliency extraction using multi-scale local windows with different sizes, the sub-images are enhanced at different decomposition scales. Finally, the enhanced result is reconstructed by synthesizing the all sub-images with adjustable synthetic weights. Since salient areas are analyzed based on fast multi-scale image decomposition, IR image can be s enhanced with good contrast successfully and rapidly. Compared with other algorithms, the experimental results prove that the proposed method is robust and efficient for IR image enhancement.