Improved Weighted Local Contrast Method for Infrared Small Target Detection

In order to address the problem of high false alarm rate and low probabilities of infrared small target detection in complex low-altitude background, an infrared small target detection method based on improved weighted local contrast is proposed in this paper. First, the ratio information between the target and local background is utilized as an enhancement factor. The local contrast is calculated by incorporating the heterogeneity between the target and local background. Then, a local product weighted method is designed based on the spatial dissimilarity between target and background to further enhance target while suppressing background. Finally, the location of target is obtained by adaptive threshold segmentation. As experimental results demonstrate, the method shows superior performance in several evaluation metrics compared with six existing algorithms on different datasets containing targets such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV).