A directional-progressive search method for infrared small target detection

Infrared small target detection plays a key role in infrared precision guidance and infrared early-warning system. It has been a difficult problem for researchers to study on how to detect targets accurately at a long distance as early as possible. Most of the existing algorithms can detect small targets in simple backgrounds, but they would fail on the detection when the background clutters are chaotic and the signal to clutter ratio (SCR) is low. Therefore, we propose a new infrared small target detection method which called a directional-progressive search (DPS) method. Our method derives from a fact that a small target is an isotropic Gaussian distribution at a long distance, while clutters show different characteristics in different directions. Based on this difference, we decompose the original image into first-order sub-images with different directions by using a first-order directional derivative (FODD) filter. Then zero-crossing points are detected in each direction step by step to distinguish small targets and background clutters. After screening progressively, the positions where existing zero-crossing points in every sub-image can be confirmed as targets. Experimental results show that our method acquires higher detection rates and lower false alarm rates compared with other methods. At the same time, our method can still keep better performance under various complex backgrounds. The robustness of our method is strong