Infrared target detection based on surfacelet transform and total variation

A dim and small target detection method based on surfacelet transform is proposed to improve the performance of dim and small target detection under the complex clouds background. Firstly, the original infrared image is decomposed by the surfacelet transform to extract and analyze the multi-scale and multi-directional characteristics of the image. Then, the total variation and the local mean removal method are utilized to process the high-frequency and the low-frequency sub-bands respectively, which refines the coefficient value of the decomposed sub-bands. Finally, the refined sub-bands are recostructed to make the dim and small target separate from the background clutter signal, and then the background suppression is achieved and the real target is detected effectively. Theoretical analysis and experimental results show that, compared with the wavelet transform method and the total variation method, values of ISCR and BSF of the experimental result by the proposed method is higher, and the result by the proposed method has better effect both in subjective vision and the objective numerical evaluation.