Adaptive Rectification Filter for Detecting Small IR Targets

Clutter suppression is one of the most important subjects in the field of small target detection under infrared (IR) strong clutter background. While removing the clutter background, however, such methods may reverse the relative energy distribution of target and noise in the clutter suppressed image, and disturb the subsequent target segmentation and detection. This paper analyzes the causation of such problems, does research on the relationship between target energy characteristics and detection probability, and presents a novel filter of energy distribution adaptive rectification (EDARF). Based on the EDARF, an improved framework of dim small target detection is proposed to rectify the energy distribution in the clutter-suppressed images by conventional adaptive filters. The proposed EDARF's performance is estimated by experimental comparisons of three linear/nonlinear filters before and after using EDARF. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed EDARF improves efficiently the performance of detecting dim small targets against strong undulant cloud-cluttered backgrounds.