Combination of wavelet transform and singular value decomposition-based contrast enhancement technique for target detection in UAV reconnaissance thermal images

Abstract

In Aerial surveillance, thermal images acquired by unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) are greatly affected due to various external interferences, which results in a low contrast image. Widely used conventional contrast enhancement methods such as histogram equalization and dynamic range partitioning techniques suffer from severe brightness changes and reduced sharpness, which in turn fail to preserve the edge details of the image. Thus for efficient target detection, it is essential to develop effective thermal infrared image contrast and edge enhancement technique. In this paper, wavelet transform (WT) and singular value decomposition (SVD)-based image enhancement technique is attempted for the target detection using thermal images captured by UAV. The discrete wavelet transform (DWT), stationary wavelet transform (SWT) and SVD are used for texture feature enhancement, edge enhancement and illumination correction, respectively. The experimental results show that the proposed technique yields higher entropy (6.7485), EMEE (2.1212), MSSIM (0.8719) and lower AMBE (21.9049) values when compared to other existing techniques.