Dual-Encoder UNet-Based Narrowband Uncooled Infrared Imaging Denoising Network

Uncooled infrared imaging systems have significant potential in industrial hazardous gas leak detection. However, the use of narrowband filters to match gas spectral absorption peaks leads to a low level of incident energy captured by uncooled infrared cameras. This results in a mixture of fixed pattern noise and Gaussian noise, while existing denoising methods for uncooled infrared images struggle to effectively address this mixed noise, severely hindering the extraction and identification of actual gas leak plumes. This paper presents a UNet-structured dual-encoder denoising network specifically designed for narrowband uncooled infrared images. Based on the distinct characteristics of Gaussian random noise and row–column stripe noise, we developed a basic scale residual attention (BSRA) encoder and an enlarged scale residual attention (ESRA) encoder. These two encoder branches perform noise perception and encoding across different receptive fields, allowing for the fusion of noise features from both scales. The combined features are then input into the decoder for reconstruction, resulting in high-quality infrared images. Experimental results demonstrate that our method effectively denoises composite noise, achieving the best results according to both objective metrics and subjective evaluations. This research method significantly enhances the signal-to-noise ratio of narrowband uncooled infrared images, demonstrating substantial application potential in fields such as industrial hazardous gas detection, remote sensing imaging, and medical imaging.