Pipeline filtering detection of stationary point targets in photon images

A photon imaging system with single photon detecting and imaging capabilities is constructed and a detection method based on pipeline filtering is proposed to detect the stationary point target under a photon limited condition. The stationary point target detection method based on pipeline filtering is studied on the characteristics of position and noise for stationary point targets in photon images. The diameter of pipeline filter is optimized to reduce the false alarm rate. The relationships of detection performance with the number of signal photons and noise photons, the pipeline length and the detection threshold are explored through photon image sequences. For the image sequence with the average incidences of signal and noise of 0.4 and 5.215 respectively, the detection rate can be more than 0.9 and the false alarm rate less than 0.08 when the pipeline length is 9 and detection threshold is 2. The conclusion from experimental results is that the detection rate is mainly affected by the number of signal photons and the false alarm rate is dependent on the number of noise photons.