Infrared Small Target Detection with Total Variation and Reweighted Regularization

Infrared small target detection plays an important role in infrared search and tracking systems applications. It is difficult to perform target detection when only a single image with complex background clutters and noise is available, where the key is to suppress the complex background clutters and noise while enhancing the small target. In this paper, we propose a novel model for separating the background from the small target based on nonlocal self-similarity for infrared patch-image. A total variation-based regularization term for the small target image is incorporated into the model to suppress the residual background clutters and noise while enhancing the smoothness of the solution. Furthermore, a reweighted sparse constraint is imposed for the small target image to remove the nontarget points while better highlighting the small target. For higher computational efficiency, an adapted version of the alternating direction method of multipliers is employed to solve the resulting minimization problem. Comparative experiments with synthetic and real data demonstrate that the proposed method is superior in detection performance to the state-of-the-art methods in terms of both objective measure and visual quality.