Detecting Maritime Infrared Targets in Harsh Environment by Improved Visual Attention Model Preselector and Anti-Jitter Spatiotemporal Filter Discriminator

Abstract

Without any prior knowledge, it has always been a serious challenge to accurately detect infrared targets under a maritime harsh environment (MHE). To solve this problem, the main contribution of this paper is to use the improved visual attention model (VAM) preselector and anti-jitter spatiotemporal filter (ASF) discriminator to detect infrared targets in the MHE. The proposed method consists of image preprocessing, the single frame detection of suspected targets and a multi-frame judgment of real targets. First, in the process of single-frame image processing, a combination of the Gaussian difference filtering and local minimum filtering is applied to overcome the uneven background brightness distribution and improve the saliency of the target. Second, an intensity standard deviation method is designed to determine the unevenness of the background. According to the difference in background smoothness, an appropriate “center-surround difference” operation is selected to suppress sea wave interference, and the single frame suspected target candidate region is obtained. Third, in order to “align” the multi-frame image sequence, a method for correcting the position of the inter-frame jitter is proposed. The inter-frame jitter is measured and compensated by the inter-frame block matching results. Finally, according to the three assumptions of multi-frame spatiotemporal filtering, single-frame false targets are filtered out and combined with the OTSU method to segment the real target area. To evaluate the performance index of the proposed method by comparing it with the four other state-of-the-art methods for dealing with the MHE. The experimental results show that the algorithm achieves the maximum detection rate (DR) on the premise of being far lower than the false alarm rate (FAR) of the comparison method. The final experimental results also confirmed that the proposed algorithm is more suitable for infrared target detection in diverse MHEs.