Dim moving infrared target enhancement based on precise trajectory extraction

Abstract

• The enhancement of dim and moving targets plays a crucial role in space-based detection to improve the detection capabilities. • We proposed a new method based on precise trajectory extraction (PTE) to meet the requirement of target enhancement under low SNR. • PTE greatly improves the precision of trajectory extraction and realizes the effective accumulation of target energy. • The proposed PTE algorithm can overcome the shortcomings of the state-of-the-art algorithms and achieve the best performance. In a space-based infrared system, the enhancement of dim and moving targets plays a crucial role in improving detection capabilities and energy accumulation is an effective way of it. However, the performance of existing approaches of energy accumulation mainly depends on the accuracy of the trajectory extraction, which suffers from limitations due to the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and unknown target-location. Therefore, this paper proposed a new enhancement method based on the extraction of the target’s precise trajectory to break this constraint. In this work, maximum projection is improved to estimate the rough location of the target by spatial and temporal information. Then, the precise trajectory is extracted by the optimization of the multi-frame shift stacking based on this location. Finally, the target’s energy is accumulated along the precise trajectory. Thus, the random noise is suppressed and the SNR is improved notably in the infrared images. Experimental results indicate that this proposed method is effective and robust for the enhancement of dim and moving targets compared with state-of-the-art algorithms. In addition, this method can be used in the infrared detection system and provides convenience for follow-up processing.