Airborne Video Image Enhancement

Images of objects and scenes on earth taken from high and low altitude aircraft have been used for many purposes including natural resource analysis, weather prediction and navigational aid. For an image of low contrast, the amplitude variations of the high frequency components of the video are small and can be masked by noise introduced during recording and transmission. Analog and digital enhancement techniques are used to enhance and retain the detail information of the scene represented by the high frequency components. Experimental results are presented for the processing of optical and radar images.