Infrared Small Target Detection Based on the Improved Density Peak Global Search and Human Visual Local Contrast Mechanism

Effective detection of small targets plays a pivotal role in infrared (IR) search and track applications for modern military defense or attack. However, IR small targets are very difficult to detect because of their weak brightness, small size, and lack of shape, structure, texture, and other information elements. In order to simultaneously satisfy the robustness and timeliness of target detection, inspired by density peak clustering and the human visual system, an idea combining an improved density peak global search and local contrast calculation is proposed. First, the positions of candidate targets are determined in the preprocessed image using the improved density peak global search method (IDPGSM). Second, the saliency map is obtained using the double-weights enhanced local contrast method (DWELCM) for the candidate target neighborhood. Finally, adaptive threshold segmentation is used to detect IR small targets. Through comprehensive analysis of five evaluation indicators, the experimental results on seven real sequences and three hundred IR images of different scenes that the proposed method has better detection performance compared with six baseline methods. It can quickly and accurately determine the small target position in the case of severe background clutter and noise interference.