Robust visual saliency detection method for infrared small target

As a key technique in automatic target detection, robust detection of small infrared target at low signal-to-noise ratio has received a lot of attentions. In order to detect infrared (IR) small targets efficaciously, the apparent characteristics and visual saliency of infrared small target were both analyzed. Thereafter, a robust saliency detection algorithm for infrared small target based on multiscale ordered contrast of image patch (MOCIP) was proposed. The cascaded MOCIP was developed to detect the saliency of infrared small target by suppressing the background and noise and enhancing the infrared small target in two consecutive steps. Consequently, the salient target can be detected with an adaptive threshold in the saliency map obtained by cascaded MOCIP. The robust saliency detection algorithm was presented in details and the efficacy was analyzed. Verification and comparison experiments of detecting the saliency of infrared small target were both conducted. All experiments results show that the proposed MOCIP method is effective and robust in overcoming the impact of noise and complex background and in detecting the saliency of infrared small target at low signal-to-noise (SNR) ratio.