A Novel Two-Stage Destriping Algorithm Based on MWIR Energy Separation and Image Guidance (MES-IG)

Long-wave infrared (LWIR) bands in multispectral datasets are extremely useful in many applications. However, the LWIR bands usually suffer from undesirable stripe noise, which impedes their further application. Compared with emission-dominated LWIR, the mid-wave infrared (MWIR) bands containing both emitted and reflected radiation usually exhibit higher image quality. In this article, we propose a novel two-stage MWIR energy separation and image guidance (MES-IG) algorithm to destripe the LWIR images with the assistance of the MWIR bands. In the first stage, we decompose the MWIR image into the emitted and reflected components by solving a constrained optimization problem. Specifically, we impose the low-rank penalty to enforce the similarities between MWIR and LWIR, and we use the total variation (TV) regularization to exploit the similarities between MWIR and visible and near-infrared (VNIR) images. In the second stage, the obtained emitted component of MWIR is considered as the guidance image to remove the stripes in the LWIR images by adopting the 1-D guided filter algorithm. Numerical experiments on the Chinese Gaofen-5 satellite and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data demonstrate the utility of the proposed method in providing improved LWIR image destriping performance over the state-of-the-art algorithms.