Infrared small target detection method based on full-direction dilation Gaussian filtering and local background estimation

Addressing the limitations of currently rare small target detection algorithms based on Human Visual Systems (HVS) that struggle with achieving satisfactory performance in complex backgrounds and lack high real-time capabilities, this paper introduces an innovative small target detection algorithm. This approach is founded on the integration of the Full-Direction Dilation Difference of Gaussians (FDD-DOG) and background estimation based on local contrast (LCBE). First, the high-frequency signal in the target area is enhanced by using the FDD-DOG operation, based on the difference between the real target and the background. Then, the background noise is further suppressed by assigning appropriate weights to the enhanced image by using local contrast-based background estimation. After that, the target to be detected is extracted by the adaptive threshold segmentation method. Experiments comparing the algorithm proposed in this paper with other HVS-based detection algorithms show that the method in this paper exhibits better detection performance in different infrared image sequences, where the background suppression factor is improved by an average of about 25 times and the signal-to-clutter ratio gain is improved by an average of about 15 times.