A Novel Image Enhancement Algorithm for a Small Target Detection of Panoramic Infrared Imagery

A novel image enhancement algorithm that can efficiently detect a small target of panoramic infrared (IR) imagery is proposed. Image enhancement is the first step for detecting and recognizing a small target in the IR imagery. The essence of the proposed algorithm is to utilize the independent histogram equalization (HE) separately over two sub-images obtained by decomposing the given image through the statistical hypothesis testing (SHT). Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has better discrimination and lower false alarm rate than the conventional algorithms. key words: panoramic infrared imagery, small target detection, statistical hypothesis testing, histogram equalization