Real-time visual enhancement for infrared small dim targets in video

Visual enhancement for infrared small dim targets is a standing problem in infrared image processing. Existing approaches cannot enhance the target well and suppress the background simultaneously, especially for targets which are so faint that they are hardly visible. This paper proposes a novel real-time visual enhancement algorithm for infrared small dim targets in video by introducing temporal cues. In this work, Dynamic Programming Algorithm (DPA) is used to detect the target's trajectory in the video and the target is enhanced through energy accumulation along the trajectory. The shape prior of the small dim target is adopted for background suppression and adaptive merging. Experimental results on real infrared small dim target videos indicate that the proposed algorithm can improve the visual quality of these types of images notably, especially for cases in which the target is hardly visible. In addition, the proposed algorithm takes on average 8.35 ms to process a 320 ∗ 256 image, and thus meets the needs of real-time applications.