The robust detection of small targets is one of the key techniques in infrared search and tracking applications. A novel small target detection method in a single infrared image is proposed in this paper. Initially, the traditional infrared image model is generalized to a new infrared patch-image model using local patch construction. Then, because of the non-local self-correlation property of the infrared background image, based on the new model small target detection is formulated as an optimization problem of recovering low-rank and sparse matrices, which is effectively solved using stable principle component pursuit. Finally, a simple adaptive segmentation method is used to segment the target image and the segmentation result can be refined by post-processing. Extensive synthetic and real data experiments show that under different clutter backgrounds the proposed method not only works more stably for different target sizes and signal-to-clutter ratio values, but also has better detection performance compared with conventional baseline methods.

Infrared Patch-Image Model for Small Target Detection in a Single Image

Analysis of new top-hat transformation and the application for infrared dim small target detection

Infrared dim target detection based on visual attention

To efficiently enhance images, a novel algorithm using multi scale image features extracted by top-hat transform is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the multi scale bright and dim regions are extracted through top-hat transform using structuring elements with the same shape and increasing sizes. Then, two types of multi scale image features, which are the multi scale bright and dim image regions at each scale and the multi scale image details between neighboring scales, are extracted and used to form the final extracted bright and dim image regions. Finally, the image is enhanced through enlarging the contrast between the final extracted bright and dim image features. Experimental results on images from different applications verified that the proposed algorithm could efficiently enhance the contrast and details of image, and produce few noise regions.

Zhang Peng

Papers

The design of Top-Hat morphological filter and application to infrared target detection