Point-targets Detection Based on Modified Recursive-Max-Filter

To realize the detection of dim point targets, algorithm of recursive-max-filtering is analyzed. The original recursive-max-filter algorithm has attractive performance in computation efficiency, but with a fatal shortcoming that the target dilating during the accumulating procedure, therefore the algorithm is believed not suitable for multi-targets detection. To deal with this problem, a Minimum-Filter has been suggested to concatenate behind the recursive-max-filter. But we find that Minimum-Filter has disadvantage of discarding the right target-accumulated-point in some cases by both theoretical analyzing and simulating. To compensate this disadvantage, we modified the minimum-filter into a conditional-minimum-filter, which execute minimum filtering only when the accumulated intensity is not the maximum one in its surrounding local area, thus potential point targets can be properly preserved and the recursive-max-filter algorithm is then extended into multi-targets detection application successfully.