Moving Point Target Detection Based on Higher Order Statistics in Very Low SNR

This letter presents an approach for the detection of moving point targets on high-frame-rate image sequences with low spatial resolution and low SNR based on higher order statistical theory. We propose a novel method for analyzing the time-domain evolution of image data for distinguishing between the background and the target in situations when the spatial signal of the target is swamped by noise. Our method is formulated to detect a time-domain transient signal of unknown scale and arrival time in noisy background. We proposed a bispectrum-based model to characterize the temporal behavior of pixels, and the detection ability under different frame rates and SNRs is analyzed. The method is evaluated using both simulated and real-world data, and we provide a comparison to other widely used point target detection approaches. Our experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm can efficiently detect extremely low SNR targets that are virtually invisible to humans based on time-domain analysis of image sequences.