The presence of stripe nonuniformity severely degrades the image quality and affects the performance in many infrared (IR) sensing applications. Prior works correct the nonuniformity by using similar spatial representations, which inevitably damage some detailed structures of the image. In this paper, we instead take advantage of spectral prior of stripe noise to solve its correction problem in single IR image. We first analyse the significant spectral difference between stripes and image structures and utilize this knowledge to characterize stripe nonuniformity. Then a two-stage filtering strategy is adopted combining spectral and spatial filtering. The proposed method enables stripe nonuniformity to be eliminated from coarse to fine, thus preserving image details well. Extensive experiments on simulated images and raw IR images demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior correction performance over the recent state-of-the-art methods.

Stripe noise is a common and unwelcome noise pattern in various thermal infrared (TIR) image data including conventional TIR images and remote sensing TIR spectral images. Most existing stripe noise removal (destriping) methods are often difficult to keep a good and robust efficacy in dealing with the real-life complex noise cases. In this paper, based on the intrinsic spectral properties of TIR images and stripe noise, we propose a novel two-stage transform domain destriping method called Fourier domain anomaly detection and spectral fusion (ADSF). Considering the principal frequencies polluted by stripe noise as outliers in the statistical spectrum of TIR images, our naive idea is first to detect the potential anomalies and then correct them effectively in the Fourier domain to reconstruct a desired destriping result. More specifically, anomaly detection for stripe frequencies is achieved through a regional comparison between the original spectrum and the expected spectrum that statistically follows a generalized Laplacian regression model, and then an anomaly weight map is generated accordingly. In the correction stage, we propose a guidance-image-based spectrum fusion strategy, which integrates the original spectrum and the spectrum of a guidance image via the anomaly weight map. The final reconstruction result not only has no stripe noise but also maintains image structures and details well. Extensive real experiments are performed on conventional TIR images and remote sensing spectral images, respectively. The qualitative and quantitative assessment results demonstrate the superior effectiveness and strong robustness of the proposed method.

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The aim of multi-focus image fusion technology is to integrate different partially focused images into one all-focused image. To realize this goal, a new multi-focus image fusion method based on a guided filter is proposed and an efficient salient feature extraction method is presented in this paper. Furthermore, feature extraction is primarily the main objective of the present work. Based on salient feature extraction, the guided filter is first used to acquire the smoothing image containing the most sharpness regions. To obtain the initial fusion map, we compose a mixed focus measure by combining the variance of image intensities and the energy of the image gradient together. Then, the initial fusion map is further processed by a morphological filter to obtain a good reprocessed fusion map. Lastly, the final fusion map is determined via the reprocessed fusion map and is optimized by a guided filter. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method does markedly improve the fusion performance compared to previous fusion methods and can be competitive with or even outperform state-of-the-art fusion methods in terms of both subjective visual effects and objective quality metrics.

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