A Non-uniform Correction Algorithm Based on Scene Nonlinear Filtering Residual Estimation

Due to the technological limitations of infrared thermography, infrared focal plane array (IFPA) imaging exhibits stripe non-uniformity, which is typically fixed pattern noise that changes over time and temperature on top of existing non-uniformities. This paper proposes a stripe non-uniformity correction algorithm based on scene-adaptive nonlinear filtering. The algorithm first uses a nonlinear filter to remove single-column non-uniformities and calculates the actual residual with respect to the original image. Then, the current residual is obtained by using the predicted residual from the previous frame and the actual residual. Finally, we adaptively calculate the gain and bias coefficients according to global motion parameters to reduce artifacts. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm protects image edges to a certain extent, converges fast, has high quality, and effectively removes column stripes and non-uniform random noise compared to other adaptive correction algorithms.