An Innovative Approach for Removing Stripe Noise in Infrared Images

The non-uniformity of infrared detectors’ readout circuits can lead to stripe noise in infrared images, which affects their effective information and poses challenges for subsequent applications. Traditional denoising algorithms have limited effectiveness in maintaining effective information. This paper proposes a multi-level image decomposition method based on an improved LatLRR (MIDILatLRR). By utilizing the global low-rank structural characteristics of stripe noise, the noise and smooth information are decomposed into low-rank part images, and texture information is adaptively decomposed into several salient part images, thereby better preserving texture edge information in the image. Sparse terms are constructed according to the smoothness of the effective information in the final low-rank part of the image and the sparsity of the stripe noise direction. The modeling of stripe noise is achieved using multi-sparse constraint representation (MSCR), and the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) is used for calculation. Extensive experiments demonstrated the proposed algorithm’s effectiveness and compared it with state-of-the-art algorithms in subjective judgments and objective indicators. The experimental results fully demonstrate the proposed algorithm’s superiority and efficacy.