Adaptive Background Suppression Method Based on Intelligent Optimization for IR Small Target Detection Under Complex Cloud Backgrounds

To improve the detection of dim and small targets in infrared (IR) images containing high-intensity cloud clutter, a novel adaptive background suppression method is proposed. By using three-dimensional cooperative filtering and differential calculation, the different and complex background clutter is suppressed. To obtain the optimal parameters for the background suppression algorithm, an adaptive parameter optimization method is proposed. The adaptive parameter optimization problem is transformed into a multiobjective optimization problem in which the signal-to-clutter ratio gain and background suppression factor, which effectively reflect the background suppression performance, are chosen as the optimization objectives, and the parameters of the proposed background suppression algorithm are considered as the variables. To effectively solve the established multiobjective optimization problem, a particle swarm parameter optimization-based method is utilized. Experimental results indicate that the proposed adaptive background suppression method using these optimal parameters has good performance for IR images in real complex scenes, as well as performance superior to that of other baseline methods.