Nonuniformity correction algorithm based on Gaussian mixture model

As an important tool to acquire information of target scene, infrared detector is widely used in imaging guidance field. Because of the limit of material and technique, the performance of infrared imaging system is known to be strongly affected by the spatial nonuniformity in the photoresponse of the detectors in the array. Temporal highpass filter(THPF) is a popular adaptive NUC algorithm because of its simpleness and effectiveness. However, there still exists the problem of ghosting artifact in the algorithms caused by blind update of parameters, and the performance is noticeably degraded when the methods are applied over scenes with lack of motion. In order to tackle with this problem, a novel adaptive NUC algorithm based on Gaussian mixed model (GMM) is put forward according to traditional THPF. The drift of the detectors is assumed to obey a single Gaussian distribution, and the update of the parameters is selectively performed based on the scene. GMM is applied in the new algorithm for background modeling, in which the background is updated selectively so as to avoid the influence of the foreground target on the update of the background, thus eliminating the ghosting artifact. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated with infrared image sequences with simulated and real fixed-pattern noise. The results show a more reliable fixed-pattern noise reduction, tracking the parameter drift, and presenting a good adaptability to scene changes.