Line Pattern Removal and Enhancement Technique for MultichannelPassive Millimeter Wave Sensor Images

Passive millimeter wave (PMMW) imaging systems have attracted an increasing interestover the past years due to their superior poor-weather performance compared with visible andIR systems. In passive imaging, the spatial information acquired is strictly band-limited. A majordrawback to PMMW images is their poor angular resolution. Also, another problem of single-channel PMMW imaging systems is the slow response time due to the lack of thermal sensitivity.The imager could operate at TV (television) rates using a number of parallel channels which mayreduce the extent of this problem. In multi-channel, differences between the responses of individualchannels can introduce noise into the image, which can obscure details of interest. The proposednoise-removal technique is a two-pass combined method of two techniques. One technique isfor removing the DC component in the frequency domain and the other one is statistical filteringbased on homogeneous region in the image (spatial) domain, followed by high-boost filteringby 3×3 mask for enhancement the image. High quality images are presented to demonstrate thepotential of this technique