Hollow Side Window Filter With Saliency Prior for Infrared Small Target Detection

Infrared (IR) small target detection is gradually attracting a cornucopia of attention and developing rapidly in the application of IR search and track (IRST) systems. However, it is often hard to extract small targets with adequate feasibility and reliability, especially under a variety of different complex backgrounds. To improve the detection performance of small target embedded in sophisticated clutters, a novel hollow side window filter (HSWF) is designed to cope with the background estimation problem. Moreover, the saliency map constructed by heterogeneity filter is utilized as a critical weighting factor during the process of HSWF. Finally, with the help of commonly adopted patch contrast measure (PCM), the small target could be easily identified from the Hadamard product of the corresponding response maps. The effectiveness and outstanding performance of the proposed method are validated through comprehensive experiments and analysis.