Small Target Detection from Infrared Remote Sensing Images Using Local Adaptive Thresholding

Small target detection from the infrared remote sensing image is a challenge task. In this article, a novel local adaptive threshold algorithm combined with heterogeneity and compactness filters is proposed to detect the small target from the infrared remote sensing images. First, the infrared image is filtered by a heterogeneity filter to enhance the target saliency. Then, the enhanced image is filtered by a compactness filter to generate a target candidate region map. Finally, for each pixel in the target candidate region, a local adaptive threshold is calculated from the enhanced image to determine whether it is a target pixel or not, and thus, the targets are extracted out. The designed heterogeneity filter and compactness filter can effectively suppress the background clutter, enhance the target, and generate target candidate regions. The proposed adaptive thresholding is a local threshold method, which is calculated in a small local window and can effectively reduce the false alarm and missing alarm. Qualitative and quantitative experiments are conducted on synthetic images and real images. The experiment results show that, with good target enhancement and background suppression, and high detection accuracy, the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.