Infrared object detection using global and local cues based on LARK

Object detection has become a challenging problem in computer vision. Locally Adaptive Regression Kernel (LARK) based detection methods are able to produce visually pleasing results without any training. We in this paper present an effective object detection method by exploring global and local cues based on LARK features. First, we encode the local context similarity by exploiting region Structural LARK (SLARK) features, which measure the likeness of a pixel to its surroundings in the query image and the test image. Second, a global constraint based on SLARK features via Heat equation is learned to detect similar features in the test image. Results from matrix cosine similarity are computed to estimate similar regions between these computed features. A compactness score is provided to refine these regions. Next, we detect the location of objects in the test image using non-maxima suppression. We show in experiments that the proposed method significantly outperforms other methods on the infrared image datasets, localizing the objects in the test images effectively.