Infrared Small Target Detection Using PPCA

Probabilistic PCA (PPCA) is an extension of PCA which reformulated PCA in a probabilistic framework. In this paper we propose a infrared small target detection algorithm using PPCA analogous to the face detection scheme using PCA, or known as “eigenface”. By computing the parameters of PPCA, we map the input vector from the image onto a subspace. After reconstructing the vector, the distance between the original vector and the reconstructed one will indicate the possibility of the input being a target. Experimental results show the effectiveness of this algorithm compared with other methods.