A simple and efficient saliency extraction method based on multi-scale horizon-directional filter for infrared dim small target detection

摘要

This paper presents a simple and computationally efficient saliency extraction method for detecting dim small target from single frame in heterogeneous background. The proposed method is based on background subtraction (BS), which identifies targets from the portion of a image that differs significantly from a background model. A set of horizon-directional filters (HDF) with multi-scales are first implemented to effectively recover the background maps from the input image. As a result, the foreground maps are extracted by computing the absolute difference between the input image and the estimated background maps. Then the foreground maps are fused into the total saliency map using a simple scheme. Finally, the experimental results of various cluttered background images show that the proposed method is efficient and has an outstanding performance in dim small target detection just by thresholding the saliency map.