For the Time Delay Integration (TDI) staggered line-scanning
thermal infrared imager, a Computational Imaging (CI) approach is
developed to achieve higher spatial resolution images. After a thorough
analysis of the causes of non-uniform image displacement and degradation
for multi-channel staggered TDI arrays, the study aims to approach onedimensional
(1D) sub-pixel displacement estimation and superposition of
images from time-division multiplexing scanning lines. Under the
assumption that a thermal image is 2D piecewise C2 smooth, a sparse-andsmooth
deconvolution algorithm with L1-norm regularization terms
combining the first and second order derivative operators is proposed to
restore high frequency components and to suppress aliasing simultaneously.
It is theoretically and experimentally demonstrated, with simulation and
airborne thermal infrared images, that this is a state-of-the-art practical CI
method to reconstruct clear images with higher frequency components from
raw thermal images that are subject to instantaneous distortion and blurring.