Effects of image restoration on automatic acquisition of moving objects in thermal video sequences degraded by the atmosphere

We aim to determine the effect of image restoration (deblurring) on the ability to acquire moving objects detected automatically from long-distance thermal video signals. This is done by first restoring the videos using a blind-deconvolution method developed recently, and then examining its effect on the geometrical features of automatically detected moving objects. Results show that for modem (low-noise and high-resolution) thermal imaging devices, the geometrical features obtained from the restored videos better resemble the true properties of the objects. These results correspond to a previous study, which demonstrated that image restoration can significantly improve the ability of human observers to acquire moving objects from long-range thermal videos. (C) 2007 Optical Society of America.