The method of infrared polariametric imaging

Abstract

Due to the low contrast ,lack of details and difficulties to distinguish target from background in traditional infrared(IR) imaging systems, the detection and recognition probability of camouflage infrared target is relatively low. Compared with the traditional IR imaging systems, the method of polarimetric imaging uses polarization information, which can help detect and isolate manmade objects from the natural environment in complex. The method of infrared polarimetric imaging is proposed in this paper. The experiment builds the IR polarimetric imaging system. An IR polarizer made of BaF2 is assembled before the IR camera. By rotating the IR polarizer, twelve polarization images are obtained at every thirty degree. The gray levels of the images are calculated by program. Stokes polarization vector representation is introduced to calculate I of stokes vector and degree of linear polarization (DoLP) with polarization images. According to the character of parameter I of stokes vector and DoLP, we propose an IR polarization fusion method based on Shearlets using regional saliency analysis. This method can highlight the target area and have good performance in the fusion of IR radiation information and IR polarization characteristics. To test the effectiveness of this method, we use mid-wave infrared (MWIR) camera and long-wave infrared(LWIR) camera to get real images. Compared with original image, both the subjective and objective evaluation results indicate that the enhanced images obtained by our method have much more image details and polarization information, which is useful for target detection and recognition.