Multiscale random projection based background suppression of infrared small target image

•We present a background suppression method based on multiscale random projection.•Nonsubsampled pyramid is applied to separates the background and targets.•The proposed method can not only efficiently reduce the spatial redundancy but also preserve target information.•Both background suppression and target enhancement can be achieved by computing Mahalanobis distance in the proposed method.

The heavy clutters background in a single infrared image containing small targets is difficult to be efficiently suppressed using the traditional methods. To overcome this difficulty, a novel infrared image background suppression method based on multiscale random projection is proposed in this paper. On the one hand, using nonsubsampled pyramid transform that decomposes the original infrared image into a low-frequency subband and a series of high-frequency subbands, the proposed method separates the background and targets from the original infrared image. On the other hand, due to a subband image cube is formed by concatenating together all the high-frequency subbands and a random projection is applied to the image cube, the proposed method can well preserve target information and reduces the spatial redundancy of the target and background information. Experimental results on three real infrared image sequences under different clutters background demonstrate that the proposed method is efficient and can obtain better performance than other methods for background suppression of infrared small target images.