INTERPOLATOR FOR INFRARED IMAGES

The use of focal plane arrays in IR imaging systems is becoming increa singly important, but in the long-wave IR region the number of detecto r elements in the array is limited by the current state of technology, and this in turn restricts the available spatial resolution or field of view. An image processing scheme is described that is able to inter polate and enhance an image in a unified moving window operation. The image is first expanded to the required size by pixel replication and then processed so that the resulting spectrum approximates that of the original scene. A numerical method has been developed to calculate th e interpolator and its use has been demonstrated in a computer simulat ion.