Infrared moving point target detection based on spatial–temporal local contrast filter

Abstract

Infrared moving point target detection is a challenging task. In this paper, we define a novel spatial local contrast (SLC) and a novel temporal local contrast (TLC) to enhance the target’s contrast. Based on the defined spatial local contrast and temporal local contrast, we propose a simple but powerful spatial–temporal local contrast filter (STLCF) to detect moving point target from infrared image sequences. In order to verify the performance of spatial–temporal local contrast filter on detecting moving point target, different detection methods are used to detect the target from several infrared image sequences for comparison. The experimental results show that the proposed spatial–temporal local contrast filter has great superiority in moving point target detection.