Infrared small-target detection using multiscale gray difference weighted image entropy

• Published in: IEEE transactions on aerospace and electronic systems Vol. 52; no. 1; pp. 60 - 72
• Main Authors: Deng, He, Sun, Xianping, Liu, Maili, Ye, Chaohui, Zhou, Xin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01-02-2016; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Clutter; Entropy; Noise measurement; Radar tracking; Signal to noise ratio; Three-dimensional displays; Weight measurement
• ISSN: 0018-9251; 1557-9603
• DOI: 10.1109/TAES.2015.140878

We propose an effective small-target detection approach based on weighted image entropy. The approach weights the local entropy measure by the multiscale grayscale difference followed by an adaptive threshold operation, which aims to improve the signal-to-noise ratio for cases in which jamming objects in the scene have similar thermal intensity measure with respect to the background as small target. The detection capability of the proposed approach has been validated on six real sequences, and the results demonstrate its significance and improvement.