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Infrared imagery is extensively used in defense, remote sensing and medical applications. While the infrared images have many advantages over RGB images, the details in these images are usually blurred which in turn leads to some difficulties for human operators. In this paper, a new method based on Laplacian of Gaussian scale-space and local variance is presented to improve the visual quality of the infrared images. At the first step, the Gaussian scale-space is constructed by convolving the original image with different Gaussian kernels. Then, the two-dimensional Laplacian kernels are convolved with the Gaussian scale-space to achieve details with both positive as well as negative contrasts. The weighted details are added to the original image to deblur the dim areas. At the final step, to increase the dynamic range of the image and have better visual quality, the local variance of the image is also added to the output of the previous step. Since finding optimum weighting coefficients is a difficult task empirically, here, we use a population-based meta-heuristic optimization algorithm called particle swarm optimization (PSO) to find the optimum values for weighting coefficient values. Beside qualitative comparison, Structural Similarity (SSIM) and second-derivative-like measure of enhancement (SDME) are used to quantitatively investigate the images quality. The proposed method outperforms the baseline algorithms in both qualitative and quantitative perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]