Correction of aeroheating-induced intensity nonuniformity in infrared images

Aeroheating-induced intensity nonuniformity effects severely influence the effective performance of an infrared (IR) imaging system in high-speed flight. In this paper, we propose a new approach to the correction of intensity nonuniformity in IR images. The basic assumption is that the low-frequency intensity bias is additive and smoothly varying so that it can be modeled as a bivariate polynomial and estimated by using an isotropic total variation (TV) model. A half quadratic penalty method is applied to the isotropic form of TV discretization. And an alternating minimization algorithm is adopted for solving the optimization model. The experimental results of simulated and real aerothermal images show that the proposed correction method can effectively improve IR image quality.