From characteristic response to target edge diffusion: An approach to small infrared target detection

Abstract

Small Infrared (IR) target detection plays an important role in flight guidance and target early warning. Most existing solutions we call local contrast (LC) based methods utilize the local contrast between the targets and the background to detect small infrared targets. This paper designs a characteristic response curve (CRC) to demonstrate characteristics of LC-based methods and proposes a multi-scale target edge diffusion model (M-TED) for small infrared target detection. First, considering the edge diffusion phenomenon on small infrared targets, the transition region is integrated with the target and the background regions to measure local contrast. In addition, global information can be used to suppress the background. Next, a customized multi-scale strategy based on the CRC is applied to generate an appropriate response map. Finally, small targets are detected via segmentation of the response map. Experiments show that the CRC-customized multi-scale strategy can significantly improve LC-based methods’ performance and our M-TED performs best on various evaluations.