Infrared moving point target detection based on an anisotropic spatial-temporal fourth-order diffusion filter

Infrared moving point target detection is a challenging task in infrared tracking systems. In this paper, an anisotropic spatial-temporal fourth-order diffusion filter (ASTFDF) is proposed for background prediction from infrared frame images. Using it, we can detect infrared point targets by subtracting the predicted background from the original image. Experiments in detecting targets from several different infrared image frame sequences indicated that the proposed ASTFDF can predict the background effectively and that the target can be detected precisely while achieving a higher background suppression factor (BSF) and signal-to-clutter ratio gain (SCRG) compared with state-of-the-art methods.