Dim and Small Target Detection in Multi-Frame Sequence Using Bi-Conv-LSTM and 3D-Conv Structure

Abstract

Infrared dim and small target detection is widely used in military and civil fields. Traditional methods in that application rely on the local contrast between the target and background for single-frame detection. On the other hand, those algorithms depend on the motion model with fixed parameters for multi-frame association. For the great similarity of gray value and the dynamic changes of motion model parameters in the condition of low SNR and strong clutter, those methods possess weak robustness, low detection probability, and high false alarm rate. In this paper, an infrared video sequences encoding and decoding model based on Bidirectional Convolutional Long Short-Term Memory structure (Bi-Conv-LSTM) and 3D Convolutional structure (3D-Conv) is proposed, addressing the problem of high similarity and dynamic changes of parameters. For solving the problem of dynamic change in parameters, Bi-Conv-LSTM structure is used to learn the motion model of targets. And for the problem of low local contrast, 3D-Conv structure is adopted to extend receptive field in the time dimension. In order to improve the precision of detection, the Decoding part is divided into two different full connections with distinctive active function. Simulation results show that the trajectory detection accuracy of the proposed model is more than 90% under the condition of low SNR and maneuvering motion, which is better than traditional method of 80% in DB-TBD 20% in others. Real data experiment to illustrate that that our proposed method can detect small infrared targets of a low false alarm rate and high detection probability.