An Omnidirectional Morphological Method for Aerial Point Target Detection Based on Infrared Dual-Band Model

• Main Authors: Rang Liu, Dejiang Wang, Ping Jia, He Sun
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2018-07-01
• Series: Remote Sensing
• Subjects: point target detection; dual-band model; optimal fused probability of detection; omnidirectional morphological filtering; local difference criterion
• Online Access: http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/10/7/1054

Aerial infrared point target detection under nonstationary background clutter is a crucial yet challenging issue in the field of remote sensing. This paper presents a novel omnidirectional multiscale morphological method for aerial point target detection based on a dual-band model. Considering that the clutter noise conforms to the Gaussian distribution, the single-band detection model under the Neyman-Pearson (NP) criterion is established first, and then the optimal fused probability of detection under the dual-band model is deduced according to the And fusion rule. Next, the omnidirectional multiscale morphological Top-hat algorithm is proposed to extract all the possible targets distributing in every direction, and the local difference criterion is employed to eliminate the residual background edges further. The dynamic threshold-to-noise ratio (TNR) is adjusted to obtain the optimal probability of detection under the constant false alarm rate (CFAR) criterion. Finally, the dim point target is extracted after dual-band data correlation. The experimental result demonstrates that the proposed method achieves a high probability of detection and performs well with respect to suppressing complex background when compared with common algorithms. In addition, it also has the advantage of low complexity and easy implementation in real-time systems.