Infrared Small Target Detection Based on Ring Local Contrast Measure With Edge Suppression

The complexity of backgrounds such as roads and cloud edges is an important factor affecting the accuracy of small target detection. In response to the high false alarm rate caused by such complex backgrounds with strong edge noise, this paper proposed an infrared small target detection method based on ring local contrast measure with edge suppression (ESRLCM). Firstly, a ring window is designed based on the distribution characteristics of small targets, the ring local contrast map is calculated based on the grayscale changes within the window. Then, the Gabor filters and improved image gradient are used to weight the obtained ring local contrast map, eliminating the influence of edge noise. Finally, small target is detected through simple threshold processing. Testing on public datasets proves that, at the same detection rate, the algorithm proposed in this paper has a lower false alarm rate compared to similar state-ofart algorithms.