Recently, security cameras and CCTV systems have become an important part of our daily lives. The rising demand for such systems has created business opportunities in this field, especially in big cities. Analogue CCTV systems are being replaced by digital systems, and HDTV CCTV has become quite common. HDTV CCTV can achieve images with high contrast and decent quality if they are clicked in daylight. However, the quality of an image clicked at night does not always have sufficient contrast and resolution because of poor lighting conditions. CCTV systems depend on infrared light at night to compensate for insufficient lighting conditions, thereby producing monochrome images and videos. However, these images and videos do not have high contrast and are blurred. We propose a nonlinear signal processing technique that significantly improves visual and image qualities (contrast and resolution) of low-contrast infrared images. The proposed method enables the use of infrared cameras for various purposes such as night shot and poor lighting environments under poor lighting conditions.

Date Published: 16 March 2015
PDF: 11 pages
Proc. SPIE 9399, Image Processing: Algorithms and Systems XIII, 939913 (16 March 2015); doi: 10.1117/12.2083092

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9399:
Image Processing: Algorithms and Systems XIII
Karen O. Egiazarian; Sos S. Agaian; Atanas P. Gotchev, Editor(s)