Gas image enhancement based on adaptive time-domain filtering and morphology

The fingerprint region of most gases is within 3 to 14μm. A mid-wave or long-wave infrared thermal imager is therefore commonly applied in gas detection. With further influence of low gas concentration and heterogeneity of infrared focal plane arrays, the image has numerous drawbacks. These include loud noise, weak gas signal, gridding, and dead points, all of which are particularly evident in sequential images. In order to solve these problems, we take into account the characteristics of the leaking gas image and propose an enhancement method based on adaptive time-domain filtering with morphology. The adaptive time-domain filtering which operates on time sequence images is a hybrid method combining the recursive filtering and mean filtering. It segments gas and background according to a selected threshold; removes speckle noise according to the median; and removes background domain using weighted difference image. The morphology method can not only dilate the gas region along the direction of gas diffusion to greatly enhance the visibility of the leakage area, but also effectively remove the noise, and smooth the contour. Finally, the false color is added to the gas domain. Results show that the gas infrared region is effectively enhanced.