Remote Sensing, Vol. 13, Pages 4189: A Method of Infrared Small Target Detection in Strong Wind Wave Backlight Conditions (Remote Sensing)

How to accurately detect small targets from the complex maritime environment has been a bottleneck problem. The strong wind-wave backlight conditions (SWWBC) is the most common situation in the process of distress target detection. In order to solve this problem, the main contribution of this paper is to propose a small target detection method suitable for SWWBC. First of all, for the purpose of suppressing the gray value of the background, it is analyzed that some minimum points with the lowest gray value tend to gather in the interior of the small target. As the distance from the extreme point increases, the gray value of the pixel in all directions also increases by the same extent. Therefore, an inverse Gaussian difference (IGD) preprocessing method similar to the distribution of the target pixel value is proposed to suppress the uniform sea wave and intensity of the sky background. So as to achieve the purpose of background suppression. Secondly, according to the feature that the small target tends to “ellipse shape” in both horizontal and vertical directions, a multi-scale and multi-directional Gabor filter is applied to filter out interference without “ellipse shape”. Combined with the inter-scale difference (IsD) operation and iterative normalization operator to process the results of the same direction under different scales, it can further suppress the noise interference, highlight the significance of the target, and fuse the processing results to enrich the target information. Then, according to different texture feature distributions of the target and noise in the multi-scale feature fusion results, a cross-correlation (CC) algorithm is proposed to eliminate noise. Finally, according to the dispersion of the number of extreme points and the significance of the intensity of the small target compared with the sea wave and sky noise, a new peak significance remeasurement method is proposed to highlight the intensity of the target and combined with a binary method to achieve accurate target segmentation. In order to better evaluate the performance index of the proposed method, compared with current state-of-art maritime target detection technologies. The experimental results of multiple image sequence sets confirm that the proposed method has higher accuracy, lower false alarm rate, lower complexity, and higher stability.