Patent ID: 8515196

Claim:
A system comprising: an infrared sensor adapted to capture infrared images; a processing component adapted to process the captured infrared images by performing a method comprising: extracting a first part from the captured infrared images substantially containing high spatial frequencies; extracting a second part from the captured infrared images where mid-spatial frequencies are enhanced; extracting a third part from the captured infrared images substantially containing low spatial frequencies; separately scaling the first, second, and third parts; and merging the scaled first, second, and third parts to generate one or more enhanced output images, and wherein extracting the second part comprises locally histogram equalizing the low spatial frequencies, the locally histogram equalizing comprising: dividing the captured infrared images into a plurality of tiles; calculating a transfer function for each tile based on a cumulative sum of a temporally filtered histogram of each tile; wherein an output of the transfer function for a pixel location is a weighted sum of the outputs from each transfer function associated with one or more nearest neighboring tiles; and wherein a weight of respective transfer function outputs are inversely proportional to a distance between a pixel location being locally histogram equalized and a center of each tile; and a display component adapted to display the enhanced output images.