Adaptive detection method of infrared small target based on target-background separation via robust principal component analysis

• A target-background separation model (T-BS) is designed.
• An image patch set is generated by using multi-scale transform and patch transform.
• Adaptive weighting parameter is regulated to recover low-rank and sparse matrices.
• A new infrared small target detection method is presented based on T-BS.

Motivated by the robust principal component analysis, infrared small target image is regarded as low-rank background matrix corrupted by sparse target and noise matrices, thus a new target-background separation model is designed, subsequently, an adaptive detection method of infrared small target is presented. Firstly, multi-scale transform and patch transform are used to generate an image patch set for infrared small target detection; secondly, target-background separation of each patch is achieved by recovering the low-rank and sparse matrices using adaptive weighting parameter; thirdly, the image reconstruction and fusion are carried out to obtain the entire separated background and target images; finally, the infrared small target detection is realized by threshold segmentation of template matching similarity measurement. In order to validate the performance of the proposed method, three experiments: target-background separation, background clutter suppression and infrared small target detection, are performed over different clutter background with real infrared small targets in single-frame or sequence images. A series of experiment results demonstrate that the proposed method can not only suppress background clutter effectively even if with strong noise interference but also detect targets accurately with low false alarm rate.