Temporal-spatial nonlinear filtering for infrared focal plane array stripe nonuniformity correction

Abstract

In this work, we introduce a temporal-spatial approach for infrared focal plane array (IRFPA) stripe nonuniformity correction in infrared images that generates visually appealing results. We posit that the nonuniformity appears as a striped structure in the spatial domain and that the pixel values change slowly in the temporal domain. Based on this, we formulate our correction method in two steps. In the first step, weighted guided image filtering with our adaptive weight is utilized to predict the stripe nonuniformity using a single frame. In the second step, the temporal profile of each pixel can be formed using a few frames of successive nonuniformity images. Further, we present a temporal nonlinear diffusion equation to remove scene residuals from the temporal profile of nonuniformity images in order to estimate a more accurate value of the stripe nonuniformity. The results of extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed nonuniformity correction algorithm substantially outperforms many state-of-the-art approaches, including both traditional and deep convolution-neural-network-based methods, on four popular infrared videos. In addition, the proposed method only requires a fraction (less than ten) of the video frames.