Ning LIU^1* and Hang QIU²

¹Nanjing XiaoZhuang University, College of Physics and Electronics, Nanjing, Jiangsu Province 211171, China
²Nanjing Institute of Technology, Industrial Center, Jiangsu Province 211167, China

(Received September 5, 2013; Accepted October 22, 2013)

Non-uniformity (NU) in infrared images can cause great degradation of the image quality and appearance. Scene-based nonuniformity correction (SBNUC) has become a very effective way to deal with NU. Although many SBNUC methods have been developed by researchers worldwide, few of them have a good correction performance and can be applied to small-package real-time devices. In this paper, we propose a time-domain projection-based registration-scene-based NU correction technology and its detailed hardware realization. We developed a new projection estimator to calculate the relative displacement of neighboring frames. The estimator uses a column and row projection vector to calculate the displacement separately without reducing the accuracy. We also developed an improved gain coefficient correction method using the corrected bias coefficient to correct the gain coefficient by clarifying the intrinsic relationship between these two coefficients instead of correcting them separately. We have also thoroughly analyzed how this technology performs with an actual infrared video sequence containing both low-frequency and high-frequency NUs. The hardware realization of this technology in a single-FPGA-core real-time system is also described in detail. We have successfully realized this technology in a real engineering application. Detailed flow charts for the hardware implementation of this algorithm are also provided.

Key words: time domain, projection estimator, non-uniformity correction, hardware realization

^*E-mail address: coolboy006@sohu.com