Novel detection method for infrared small targets using weighted information entropy

This paper presents a method for detecting the small infrared target under complex background. An algorithm, named local mutation weighted information entropy (LMWIE), is proposed to suppress background. Then, the grey value of targets is enhanced by calculating the local energy. Image segmentation based on the adaptive threshold is used to solve the problems that the grey value of noise is enhanced with the grey value improvement of targets. Experimental results show that compared with the adaptive Butterworth high-pass filter method, the proposed algorithm is more effective and faster for the infrared small target detection.