A noise-robust method for infrared small target detection

In this paper, a noise-robust method is proposed for infrared small target detection. In the proposed method, according to the differences between the real targets and the noise, a suitable filter is provided to enhance the target. The proposed method is named Branch Local Contrast Measure (BLCM). This small target detection method is designed to ignore noisy pixels in IR images. In the experiment, 431 IR images with small dim targets containing various sources of false response have been used to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results demonstrate that the BLCM method outperforms the other state of the arts for small target detection in the noisy image.