Abstract
Infrared small target detection under complex background is of great significance in the field of remote sensing, such as optical remote sensing, infrared precise guidance, infrared surveillance, and night navigation. Because of low-contrast and complex-background clutters of infrared images, infrared small target detection under complex background is difficult and has a serious false alarm. In this paper, a difference-based local contrast method is proposed to improve the detection performance. First, a median filtering process is used to reduce pixel-sized noises, and infrared image after filtering is divided into a series of sub-images. Then, a difference-based local contrast measure based on contrast mechanism is calculated for generating the saliency map, which can exceedingly improve the detection rate and reduce the false alarm rate. Eventually, an adaptive threshold is used to extract the target sub-image. Experiments on five real infrared small target image datasets show that the proposed method is robust and effective with great respect to detection accuracy. Our method can achieve a higher detection rate and lower false alarm rate under complex background with better performance in target enhancement and background suppression compared with the traditional algorithms.
Highlights
In recent years, infrared imaging systems have been widely used in military and civilian fields such as optical remote sensing [1], infrared precise guidance, infrared surveillance [2] and night navigation [3], [4] due to the development of infrared imaging technology
A difference-based local contrast measure which combines the filtering method and the detection method is proposed to improve the detection performance including the increase of detection rate and decrease of false alarm rate
In this paper, a difference-based infrared small target detection algorithm based on contrast mechanism is proposed for infrared small target detection under complex background
Summary
In recent years, infrared imaging systems have been widely used in military and civilian fields such as optical remote sensing [1], infrared precise guidance, infrared surveillance [2] and night navigation [3], [4] due to the development of infrared imaging technology. The infrared small target is a pixel-sized image region whose brightness is higher than its neighborhood on the whole Based on this characteristic, LCM measures every pixel’s contrast relative to its neighborhood in the whole image. In order to further prove the robust resistance of single point-sized electronic noises of the proposed method compared with ILCM, we select an infrared image that contains one small target and one single point-sized electronic noise which is shown in Fig. 4 (a) labeled in a rectangle and a circle respectively. It can be seen from these figures that ILCM measure maintains the target and the noise almost the same value while the proposed DLCM method enhances only the target and can achieve a prefect resistance nearly to zero towards the single point-sized noise
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