Dual channel and multi-scale adaptive morphological methods for infrared small targets

Infrared small target detection is a challenging task. Morphological operators with a single structural element size are easily affected by complex background noise, and the detection performance is easily affected by multi-scale background noise environments. In order to enhance the detection performance of infrared small targets, we propose a dual channel and multi-scale adaptive morphological method (DMAM), which consists of three stages. Stages 1 and 2 are mainly used to suppress background noise, while stage 3 is mainly used to enhance the small target area. The multi-scale adaptive morphological operator is used to enhance the algorithm’s adaptability to complex background environments, and in order to further eliminate background noise, we have set up a dual channel module. The experimental results indicate that this method has shown superiority in both quantitative and qualitative aspects in comparison methods, and the effectiveness of each stage and module has been demonstrated in ablation experiments. The code and data of the paper are placed in https://pan.baidu.com/s/19psdwJoh-0MpPD41g6N_rw.