A comparison of different infrared image enhancement techniques for sea surface targets

This study provides a comparative analysis of different infrared image enhancement techniques for sea surface targets. Image enhancement is the most important preprocessing step of automatic target recognition and tracking algorithms. For efficient target detection and tracking, it is important to develop infrared image enhancement techniques to increase the contrast between the target and background, emphasize edges, and suppress medium and sensor noises and the background clutter. In this paper, performances of different histogram modification, filtering, and morphological processing techniques are compared for sea surface targets´ detection using both real and synthetic images. It is observed that balanced contrast limited histogram equalization and contrast enhancement technique provides best result for different scenarios in quantitative and subjective tests.