Improved interframe registration based nonuniformity correction for focal plane arrays

In this paper, an improved interframe registration based nonuniformity correction algorithm for focal plane arrays is proposed. The method simultaneously estimates detector parameters and carries out the nonuniformity correction by minimizing the mean square error between the two properly registered image frames. A new masked phase correlation algorithm is introduced to obtain reliable shift estimates in the presence of fixed pattern noise. The use of an outliers exclusion scheme, together with a variable step size strategy, could not only promote the correction precision considerably, but also eliminate ghosting artifacts effectively. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated with clean infrared image sequences with simulated nonuniformity and real pattern noise. We also apply the method to a real-time imaging system to show how effective it is in reducing noise and the ghosting artifacts.