A comprehensive survey on image enhancement techniques with special emphasis on infrared images

Abstract

Capturing of infrared images is an easy task but perceptual visualization is difficult due to environmental conditions such as light rain, partly cloudy, mostly cloudy, haze, poor lightening conditions, noise generated by the sensors, geographical distance and appearances of the objects. To improve the human perception and quality of the infrared images for further processing like image analysis, image enhancement is an essential process. This paper provides a detailed review of various image enhancement techniques from contrast stretching to optimization methods used in infrared images. It also discusses the existing infrared image enhancement techniques as group such as histogram based methods, filter based methods, transform domain based methods, morphological based methods, saliency extraction methods, fuzzy based methods, learning methods, optimization methods and its popular algorithms also address the countless issues. Some of the existing image enhancement methods (Histogram Equlization, Max-median filter, Top-Hat transform) and infrared image enhancement methods (multi-scale top-hat transform, adaptive infrared image enhancement) are implemented along with the adaptive fuzzy based infrared image enhancement method and its obtained results evaluation is done on subjective and objective ways. From the results observed that the fuzzy based method works well for both subjective and objective evaluation. The paper aims to provide a complete study on image enhancement techniques and how they specially utilized while dealing with infrared images. In addition, the paper helps the researchers to select the suitable infrared image enhancement techniques for their infrared image application needs.