Infrared Small Target Detection Based on Compound Eye Structural Feature Weighting and Regularized Tensor

Compared to conventional single-aperture infrared cameras, the bio-inspired infrared compound eye camera integrates the advantages of infrared imaging technology with the benefits of multi-aperture systems, enabling simultaneous information acquisition from multiple perspectives. This enhanced detection capability demonstrates unique performance in applications such as autonomous driving, surveillance, and unmanned aerial vehicle reconnaissance. Current single-aperture small target detection algorithms fail to exploit the spatial relationships among compound eye apertures, thereby underutilizing the inherent advantages of compound eye imaging systems. This paper proposes a low-rank and sparse decomposition method based on bio-inspired infrared compound eye image features for small target detection. Initially, a compound eye structural weighting operator is designed according to image characteristics, which enhances the sparsity of target points when combined with the reweighted l1-norm. Furthermore, to improve detection speed, the structural tensor of the effective imaging region in infrared compound eye images is reconstructed, and the Representative Coefficient Total Variation method is employed to avoid complex singular value decomposition and regularization optimization computations. Our model is efficiently solved using the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM). Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model can rapidly and accurately detect small infrared targets in bio-inspired compound eye image sequences, outperforming other comparative algorithms.