A Fast Detection Method for Infrared Small Targets in Complex Sea and Sky Background

The traditional infrared small target detection method is easy to cause false alarms in the complex sea and sky background. In this letter, a fast detection method for infrared small targets in the complex sea and sky background is proposed. Firstly, in order to make full use of the Gaussian characteristics of infrared small targets and effectively distinguish the target from the background clutter, the SODD (second order directional derivative) filter is used to improve the target signal-to-clutter ratio (SCR) and suppress the background clutter; Secondly, in order to improve the real-time performance of the algorithm, we improve the existing MPCM algorithm by reducing the difference dimension between the target area and the local background area; Finally, we use pipeline filtering that can take full advantage of candidate target location, size, and total grayscale 3D information to complete multi-frame target validation and achieve continuous target detection in image sequences. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can stably and accurately detect infrared small targets in the infrared image sequence.