Moving dim target detection of infrared image based on improved power-law detector

Power-Law detector based on DFT is developed to detect a moving dim target under heavy infrared background. Because that the grey-scale value of a pixel in an image occurs fluctuation when a target passes by, this fluctuation can be viewed as a weak transient signal, and the Power-Law processor has advanced performance on transient signal detection. Firstly, a time window, length of L frames, is introduced in the algorithm. And then, the current frame at the center of the window is processed with max-median filtering algorithm for the clutter suppression and the adaptive threshold segmentation is used to obtain the candidate target pixels. The improved Power-Law detector is used in the window to detect the transient signal caused by the true target among the candidate pixels. The experimental results show that the algorithm can reliably detect dim targets with SCR larger than 1.