Infrared small target and background separation via column-wise weighted robust principal component analysis

•WIPI model incorporates structural prior into the target-background separation.•Weight is adaptive for each column in patch-image according to its patch structure.•The adaptive weight for each column is designed based on the steering kernel.•To solve the CWPRCA problem, an algorithm is developed based on ADM.

When facing extremely complex infrared background, due to the defect of l1l1 norm based sparsity measure, the state-of-the-art infrared patch-image (IPI) model would be in a dilemma where either the dim targets are over-shrinked in the separation or the strong cloud edges remains in the target image. In order to suppress the strong edges while preserving the dim targets, a weighted infrared patch-image (WIPI) model is proposed, incorporating structural prior information into the process of infrared small target and background separation. Instead of adopting a global weight, we allocate adaptive weight to each column of the target patch-image according to its patch structure. Then the proposed WIPI model is converted to a column-wise weighted robust principal component analysis (CWRPCA) problem. In addition, a target unlikelihood coefficient is designed based on the steering kernel, serving as the adaptive weight for each column. Finally, in order to solve the CWPRCA problem, a solution algorithm is developed based on Alternating Direction Method (ADM). Detailed experiment results demonstrate that the proposed method has a significant improvement over the other nine classical or state-of-the-art methods in terms of subjective visual quality, quantitative evaluation indexes and convergence rate.