Edge enhancement of infrared imagery by way of the anisotropic diffusion pyramid

The problem of enhancing and detecting edges in infrared images is addressed in this paper. The proposed solution utilizes a multiresolution structure called the anisotropic diffusion pyramid (ADP), which is created by successive application of anisotropic diffusion and subsampling. A pyramid node linking process is used to segment the image and to detect edges. For the slowly varying sigmoidal edges in the IR imagery, it is shown that the diffusion process is effective in edge enhancement. Furthermore, system parameters are derived to maximize the edge sharpening ability of the ADP. The ADP avoids the “staircase” artifacts of single-resolution diffusion algorithms and avoids the localization and region merging problems of pyramids based on linear filters