A robust approach for detecting infrared small dim targets

摘要

A new detection algorithm of dim moving targets in the IR image sequences is presented. The images consist mainly of sensor noise, drifting background clutter and low contrast targets. So it is difficult to provide reliable detection in just a single frame. This algorithm adopts multi-scale gradient to suppress the clutter according to its spatial distribution feature. Then the recursive maximum similarity (RMS) filter is used to accumulate targets energy in temporal domain. The advantage of the algorithm is that it realizes the enhancement of the target gradient feature and clutter suppressing in the same time. The results show that the algorithm can effectively detect the real small dim targets even if there is strong clutter influence.