Abstract
The white top-hat
transformation has been widely used in small bright target extraction.
It usually applies an erosion operation to remove the target and then
a dilation operation to recover the intensity of the processed image.
A bright target will be extracted by subtracting the opening operation
(erosion followed by dilation) from the raw image. The drawback of
this method is that its denoising ability is poor because the
estimated background threshold by an opening operation is smaller than
the raw image. This study puts forward the viewpoint that by use of a
proposed one-dimensional (1D) symmetrical line-shaped structuring
element a bright target can also be removed by the dilation operation.
Consequently, the white top-hat transformation can be implemented by
subtracting only the dilation operation from the raw image. To the
best knowledge of the authors, it is the first time to use this method
to achieve the top-hat transformation. The simulation experiment shows
that the proposed 1D top-hat algorithm has excellent performance in
denoising ability and detection ability. Moreover, real night
experiments demonstrate that our proposed algorithm can work reliably
under both complicated background conditions and good weather
conditions. It is noticeable that the performance of computational
efficiency and resource consumption have been considerably improved
because a 1D structuring element is employed and the erosion operation
is not included.
Funder
National Natural Science Foundation of
China
Natural Science Foundation of Hunan
Province
Subject
Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics,Engineering (miscellaneous),Electrical and Electronic Engineering