Hit-or-miss transform based infrared dim small target enhancement

To efficiently enhance a dim infrared small target embedded in heavy clutter, a hit-or-miss transform based method is proposed in this paper. First, the gray level hit-or-miss transform is given and discussed. Then, by analyzing the structuring elements used in the hit-or-miss transform following the purpose of infrared small target enhancement, a simple infrared small target enhancement method is proposed by using flat structuring elements and a threshold parameter. The threshold imports the properties of infrared small target into the gray level hit-or-miss transform, which improves the performance of the hit-or-miss transform for infrared small target enhancement. Experimental results on infrared dim small target images with different clutter backgrounds verified that the proposed method was efficient for infrared small target enhancement.