An infrared target detection algorithm based on lateral inhibition and singular value decomposition

This paper proposes an infrared target detection algorithm based on lateral inhibition (LI) and singular value decomposition (SVD). Firstly, a local structure descriptor based on SVD of gradient domain is constructed, which reflects basic structures of the local regions of an infrared image. Then, LI network is modified by combining LI with the local structure descriptor for enhancing target and suppressing background. Meanwhile, to calculate lateral inhibition coefficients adaptively, the direction parameters are determined by the dominant orientations obtained from SVD. Experimental results show that, compared with the typical algorithms, the proposed algorithm not only can detect small target or area target under complex backgrounds, but also has excellent abilities of background suppression and target enhancement.