Infrared Moving Small Target Detection Based on Spatial–Temporal Feature Fusion Tensor Model

Infrared moving small target detection is an important and challenging task in infrared search and track system, especially in the case of low signal-to-clutter ratio (SCR) and complex scenes. The spatial–temporal information has not been fully utilized, and there is a serious imbalance in their exploitation, especially the lack of long-term temporal characteristics. In this article, a novel method based on the spatial–temporal feature fusion tensor model is proposed to solve these problems. By directly stacking raw infrared images, the sequence can be transformed into a third-order tensor, where the spatial–temporal features are not reduced or destroyed. Its horizontal and lateral slices can be viewed as 2-D images, showing the change of gray values of horizontal/vertical fixed spatial pixels over time. Then, a new tensor composed of several serial slices are decomposed into low-rank background components and sparse target components, which can make full use of the temporal similarity and spatial correlation of background. The partial tubal nuclear norm is introduced to constrain the low-rank background, and the tensor robust principal component analysis problem is solved quickly by the alternating direction method of multipliers. By superimposing all the decomposed sparse components into the target tensor, small target can be segmented from the reconstructed target image. Experimental results of synthetic and real data demonstrate that the proposed method is superior to other state-of-the-art methods in visual and numerical results for targets with different sizes, velocities, and SCR values under different complex backgrounds.