Double Layered-Background Removal Filter for Detecting Small Infrared Targets in Heterogenous Backgrounds

Abstract

Detecting small targets is essential for mitigating the sea-based Infrared search and track (IRST) problem. It is easy to detect small targets in homogeneous backgrounds such as the sky. When targets are on the border line of heterogeneous backgrounds such as the horizon in the sky and sea surface, solving the problem of detection becomes difficult. This paper presents a novel spatial filtering method, called Double Layered-Background Removal Filter (DL-BRF), for achieving high detection rates and low false alarm rates. DL-BRF consists of a Modified-Mean Subtraction Filter (M-MSF) and a consecutive LocalDirectional Background Removal Filter (L-DBRF). M-MSF enhances the target signal and reduces background noise. L-DBRF removes horizontal structures, which upgrade the signal-to-clutter ratio and background suppression factor. L-DBRF used after M-MSF enhances the synergistic performance of horizontal target detection. Additionally, the adaptive Hysteresis threshold-based scheme is a suitable detection method. We validate the superior performance of the proposed method via three types of evaluation tests, including a real test scenario.

Adaptive detection method of infrared small target based on target-background separation via robust principal component analysis

“…In order to validate the background clutter suppression performance of proposed method, three types of metrics: signal-to-clutter ratio (SCR), improvement of signal-to-clutter ratio (ISCR), background suppression factor (BSF) are adopted [49]. The SCR represents the difficulty of infrared small target detection, and it is defined by:…”

Variation analysis of 24 hour winter infrared images for small target detection

“…threshold-based target detection method [3]. As shown in Fig. I, an input image (I( x , y )) is pre-filtered using Gaussian coefficients (G3 x 3( X , y )) to enhance the target signal and reduce the level of thermal noise as according to equation (1).…”

“…Small infrared target detection is important for a range of military applications, such as infrared search and track (IRST) and active protection system (A PS) [3], [4], [5], [6]. In particular, an APS is a system designed to protect tanks from guided missile or rocket attack by a physical counterattack.…”

Thermal Infrared Small Ship Detection in Sea Clutter Based on Morphological Reconstruction and Multi-Feature Analysis

“…These methods try to extract the ship target from background via modeling on the premise of acquiring abundant knowledge about the infrared radiation characteristics of ship target and background, but it is difficult to meet these requirements. To solve this problem, Kim et al [11,12] estimated the background and distinguished the target from sea clutter by using the heterogeneous background removal filter. Furthermore, the statistical histogram curve transforms were also developed for the infrared maritime target detection based on the model assumption that the ship target region is much brighter than the background, such as the methods mentioned in [13,14].…”