Multiscale patch-based contrast measure for small infrared target detection

• A biologically inspired target enhancement method called multiscale patch-based contrast measure (MPCM) is presented.
• Based on MPCM, a small IR target detection algorithm is designed.
• The proposed small target detection method achieves promising detection performance on three real IR image sequences.

Infrared (IR) small target detection plays an important role in IR guidance systems. In this paper, a biologically inspired method called multiscale patch-based contrast measure (MPCM) is proposed for small IR target detection. MPCM can increase the contrast between target and background, which makes it easy to segment small target by simple adaptive thresholding method. Experimental results on three sequences demonstrate that the proposed small target detection method can not only suppress background clutter effectively even if with strong noise interference, but also detect targets accurately with low false alarm rate and high speed.