Infrared images have the high dynamic range characteristic, generally digitized to 14 bit. While most display devices can only show 8 bit images, so high bit-wide infrared image signal should be compressed to low bit-wide display data without losing the important detail information. A new high-dynamic-range compression and detail enhancement algorithm for infrared images is presented in this paper. In the proposed algorithm, the original infrared image is separated into the low-frequency base component and the high-frequency detail component. Then the base component is compressed with the simple gray level linear mapping, and the detail component is enhanced with the S-curve transformation. Finally, the two components are combined to get the 8 bit enhanced image. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve the dynamic range compression while effectively preserve and enhance the local detail information.
Gradient domain high dynamic range compression
