A Ratio-Difference Local Feature Contrast Method for Infrared Small Target Detection

Local contrast has been proven to be effective in infrared (IR) small target detection, but existing algorithms still have some drawbacks. In this letter, a ratio-difference (RD) local feature contrast (LFC) method is proposed. First, a new nested window is designed, and the local gray contrast is selected as the features of inner and outer windows to investigate the characteristics of a local area. Then, the RD LFC is calculated. At last, a simple but useful weighting function is proposed. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm can achieve better performance in terms of detection rate and false alarm rate and has good robustness against noise.