High-boost-based local Weber contrast method for infrared small target detection

Dim and small infrared target fast detection guided by visual saliency

A pixel-level local contrast measure for infrared small target detection

Infrared small target detection is one of the most important parts of infrared search and tracking (IRST) system. Generally, the small and dim target is of low signal-to-noise ratio and buried in the complicated background and heavy noise, which makes it extremely difficult to be detected with low false alarm rates. To solve this problem, we propose a small target detection method based on multiscale local contrast measure. Different from conventional methods, we novelly measure the local contrast from two aspects: local dissimilarity and local brightness difference. First, we present a new dissimilarity measure called the local energy factor (LEF) to describe the dissimilarity between the small targets and their surrounding backgrounds. Second, the feature of the brightness difference between the small targets and the backgrounds is utilized. Afterward, the local contrast is measured by taking both features of the above into account. Finally, an adaptive segmentation method is applied to extract the small targets from the backgrounds. Extensive experiments on real test data set demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches.

The infrared (IR) small target detection algorithm with a high detection rate, low false alarm rate, and high real-time performance has significant application value in the field of IR remote sensing. IR small targets in complex backgrounds have low contrast and low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Therefore, small target detection is more difficult. Traditional IR small target detection is generally implemented by local contrast methods (LCM), nonlocal autocorrelation methods (NAM), and adaptive segmentation. In this letter, a robust infrared small target detection network (RISTDnet) is proposed based on deep learning. In RISTDnet, a feature extraction framework combining handcrafted feature methods and convolutional neural networks is constructed, a mapping network between feature maps and the likelihood of small targets in the image is established, and a threshold is applied on the likelihood map to segment real targets. Experimental results show that the RISTDnet can detect small targets with different sizes and low SNRs in complex backgrounds and have better effectiveness and robustness against existing algorithms.

It is always a difficult challenge to detect small infrared targets under complex background and ensure high detection rate and low false alarm rate. In this paper, a detection method based on morphological Top-hat filtering and local energy difference is proposed. This method utilizes the advantage that morphological Top-hat filter can suppress the backgTround, and then segmented the image based on local energy difference to identify small targets. In this paper, the specific detection process of this method is given, and a number of small infrared target grayscale images under complex background are selected for the simulation experiment. The experimental results show that this method has a high detection rate and a low false alarm rate, and is of certain reference value for the detection of small infrared targets under complex background.

Effective detection of small targets plays a pivotal role in infrared (IR) search and track applications for modern military defense or attack. However, IR small targets are very difficult to detect because of their weak brightness, small size, and lack of shape, structure, texture, and other information elements. In order to simultaneously satisfy the robustness and timeliness of target detection, inspired by density peak clustering and the human visual system, an idea combining an improved density peak global search and local contrast calculation is proposed. First, the positions of candidate targets are determined in the preprocessed image using the improved density peak global search method (IDPGSM). Second, the saliency map is obtained using the double-weights enhanced local contrast method (DWELCM) for the candidate target neighborhood. Finally, adaptive threshold segmentation is used to detect IR small targets. Through comprehensive analysis of five evaluation indicators, the experimental results on seven real sequences and three hundred IR images of different scenes that the proposed method has better detection performance compared with six baseline methods. It can quickly and accurately determine the small target position in the case of severe background clutter and noise interference.

A small target detection algorithm in infrared image by combining multi-response fusion and local contrast enhancement

Infrared (IR) small target detection in complex backgrounds is one of the key technologies in IR search and tracking applications. Although significant progress has been made over the past few decades, how to separate a small target from complex backgrounds remains a challenging task. In this letter, a novel small target detection method via multidirectional derivative-based weighted contrast measure (MDWCM) is proposed. Initially, multidirectional derivative subbands are quickly obtained by the facet model. Then, an effective division scheme of surrounding area is performed to capture the derivative properties of the target. A new local contrast measure is constructed to simultaneously enhance the target and suppress the background clutter. Third, the MDWCM maps constructed from all derivative subbands are integrated to enhance the robustness of detection. Finally, the small target is extracted by an adaptive segmentation method. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm performs favorably compared to other state-of-the-art methods.

Research on Infrared Dim and Small Target Detection Algorithm Based on Low-Rank Tensor Recovery

To detect small infrared targets under the condition of dense clutters, we propose a single-frame target detection algorithm based on a small bounding-box filter, which is characterized by good adaptability to the position and size of a small target. During the small target detection process, the proposed algorithm first searches for the local maximum gray pixel and then, a set of concentric bounding boxes whose center is the pixel found in the first step is constructed, and the detection thresholds of a neighboring region of this pixel are calculated based on the bounding boxes. Finally, the minimum threshold is used to detect small target pixels in the neighboring region. A fast version of the proposed algorithm is a minimum bounding-box filter, which can be implemented by dividing an image into blocks and using the mid-range and range to assess the concentration trend and dispersion of the background. Simulation and analysis results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve high detection probability and low false alarm rate when detecting small targets in the complex background; while its fast version has high computational efficiency. The proposed algorithm can be used in infrared searching and tracking systems.

Robust small target detection of low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is very important in infrared search and track applications for self-defense or attacks. Consequently, an effective small target detection algorithm inspired by the contrast mechanism of human vision system and derived kernel model is presented in this paper. At the first stage, the local contrast map of the input image is obtained using the proposed local contrast measure which measures the dissimilarity between the current location and its neighborhoods. In this way, target signal enhancement and background clutter suppression are achieved simultaneously. At the second stage, an adaptive threshold is adopted to segment the target. The experiments on two sequences have validated the detection capability of the proposed target detection method. Experimental evaluation results show that our method is simple and effective with respect to detection accuracy. In particular, the proposed method can improve the SNR of the image significantly.

Star sensor is disturbed by strong straylight, which increases the gray level of the captured star map, and this leads to invalid detection of star points and affects the high-precision location of the centroid. To address this issue, we propose a star centroid localization method based on gradient-oriented multi-directional local contrast enhancement. First, the background gray level distribution patterns of star sensors under various actual straylight interference conditions are analyzed. Based on this analysis, a background imaging model for complex operational scenarios is established. Finally, simulations are conducted under complex conditions with straylight images to test the star point detection rate, false detection rate, centroid localization accuracy, and statistical significance testing. The results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the TOP-HAT, MAX-BACKG (Max-Background Filtering), LCM (Local Contrast Measure), MPCM (Multiscale Patch-Based Contrast Measure), and CMLCM (Curvature-Based Multidirectional Local Contrast Method for Star Detection of Star Sensor) algorithms in terms of star point detection rate. Additionally, the RMSE centroid localization error is achieved with 0.1 pixels, demonstrating its ability to effectively locate star centroids under complex conditions and meet certain engineering application requirements.

Infrared (IR) small target detection has become an important technology in infrared searching and tracking system, infrared radar warning system and infrared imaging tracking system. Among several computational models we use a local contrast method (LCM) to detect IR small target which is inspired by human vision system (HVS) and derived kernel (DK) model. This paper presents a system architecture which employs a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) as the hardware processing platform for small target detection in infrared image at low signal-noise ratio (SNR). Performance of the IR small target detection system will be evaluated by performing several experiments. The platform based on FPGA will provide high computational performance to satisfy the real-time processing and low power consumption requirements.

Small infrared target detection is one of the key techniques in infrared searching and tracking applications. A novel small target detection method based on the complex filter bank is proposed in this paper. Firstly, a training sample dataset is built and the complex filter bank is utilized to extract the feature representation of each pixel. Then, the support vector machine is used to detect the small target. Finally, a simple adaptive segmentation method is adopted to segment the result image. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, background clutter suppression and small target detection probability experiments are conducted over real infrared small targets in two image sequences. The experiment results show that the proposed method can not only suppress background clutter effectively, but also detect targets accurately with low false alarm rate.

To mitigate the issue of minimal intrinsic features for pure data-driven methods, in this paper, we propose a novel model-driven deep network for infrared small target detection, which combines discriminative networks and conventional model-driven methods to make use of both labeled data and the domain knowledge. By designing a feature map cyclic shift scheme, we modularize a conventional local contrast measure method as a depth-wise parameterless nonlinear feature refinement layer in an end-to-end network, which encodes relatively long-range contextual interactions with clear physical interpretability. To highlight and preserve the small target features, we also exploit a bottom-up attentional modulation integrating the smaller scale subtle details of low-level features into high-level features of deeper layers. We conduct detailed ablation studies with varying network depths to empirically verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the design of each component in our network architecture. We also compare the performance of our network against other model-driven methods and deep networks on the open SIRST dataset as well. The results suggest that our network yields a performance boost over its competitors. Our code, trained models, and results are available online.