Multi-pixel photon counting detectors can produce images in low-light environments based on passive photon counting technology. However, the resulting images suffer from problems such as low contrast, low brightness, and some unknown noise distribution. To achieve a better visual effect, this paper describes a denoising and enhancement method based on a block-matching 3D filter and a non-subsampled contourlet transform (NSCT). First, the NSCT was applied to the original image and histogram-equalized image to obtain the sub-band low- and high-frequency coefficients. Regional energy and scale correlation rules were used to determine the respective coefficients. Adaptive single-scale retinex enhancement was applied to the low-frequency components to improve the image quality. The high-frequency sub-bands whose line features were best preserved were selected and processed using a symbol function and the Bayes-shrink threshold. After applying the inverse transform, the fused photon counting image was subjected to an improved block-matching 3D filter, significantly reducing the operation time. The final result from the proposed method was superior to those of comparative methods in terms of several objective evaluation indices and exhibited good visual effects and details from the objective impression.

Aiming at the problems of low image brightness, poor contrast, and blurred edges caused by insufficient illumination and noise during low-level-light imaging for multi-pixel photon counter (MPPC), an adaptive low-level-light image processing algorithm based on sub-window box filtering was proposed. To reduce the algorithm running time while highlighting the edge detail information of the image, the sub-window box filter was used to layer the image to obtain the basic layer and detail layer. For the image of basic layer, the adaptive threshold histogram equalization was used to stretch the contrast, and the image of detail layer was enhanced by adaptive gain control method. The fusion coefficient was determined adaptively based on the ratio of the number of effective gray values to the total gray in the image of basic layer, and the image of basic layer was fused with the image of detail layer to obtain the enhanced image. Three sets of low-level-light environments with different illumination levels were set by the low-level-light experimental platform for experimental simulation, which verified that the algorithm obtained better results in maintaining edge information and enhancing details. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is superior to the previous algorithm in objective evaluation of standard deviation, information entropy, and average gradient, which improves the imaging effect of low-level-light image.