Morphological operator for infrared dim small target enhancementusing dilation and erosion through structuring element construction

To effectively enhance infrared dim small target, a new morphological operator is proposed by construc-ting two structuring elements based on the properties of target regions and their surrounding background.By utilizing the two constructed structuring elements, the proposed morphological operator uses dilationand erosion to enhance the target regions and suppresses the surrounding background, which directlyachieves infrared small target enhancement. Also, the proposed method is simplified by using flat struc-turing elements. Experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively enhance infrareddim small target embedded in clutter background.