Statistics of Infrared Images

The proliferation of low-cost infrared cameras gives us a new angle for attacking many unsolved vision problems by leveraging a larger range of the electromagnetic spectrum. A first step to utilizing these images is to explore the statistics of infrared images and compare them to the corresponding statistics in the visible spectrum. In this paper, we analyze the power spectra as well as the marginal and joint wavelet coefficient distributions of datasets of indoor and outdoor images. We note that infrared images have noticeably less texture indoors where temperatures are more homogenous. The joint wavelet statistics also show strong correlation between object boundaries in IR and visible images, leading to high potential for vision applications using a combined statistical model.