What is image enhancement and thermal imaging?
by admin on Friday, March 19th, 2010 | 2 Comments
How do image enhancement and thermal imaging help us see in the dark? Please describe both in detail.
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Thermal imaging means to use a camera or film sensitive to thermal radiation. Thermal radiation is next to visible light, just has longer wavelength. Thermal radiation is emitted by everything warmer than its environment. Everything colder than its environment absorbs thermal radiation. Because this radiation is emitted by warm bodies themself, they are visible even when it is pitch dark in terms of visible light. Warm bodies "glow" in thermal radiation.
Image enhancement includes many techniques, follow the link below to get an impression. Basically it adjusts a digital image (colour or greyscale) by enhancing contrasts, contours, adjusting colours etc, Digital fotos are nothing but numbers, usually 0 to 255 for each of red, green and blue. By mapping these colours and combinations to other colours detail can be made visible that otherwise would be to weak to be perceived.
Thermal imaging works off of invisible "light" due to heat. That invisible light is often called infared.
Image enhancement can take a partial picture that say is snowy, integrate it (add up a bunch of pictures overlaid together of the same thing) and then present the viewer a much clearer image.
There are many uses of Fast Fourier Transform, digital signal processing, time delayed integration, etc. that allows images to be "enhanced."