Background suppression based-on wavelet transformation to detect infrared target

Target detection and location in infrared clutter background is very important to infrared search and track system. Especially for small target detection in infrared image in background of sea and sky, there are no geometric and structure character to use. When targets such as ship and naval vessel sailing at long distance, they always appear around the sea-level line, and it is mixed with cloud and sea-wave clutter. It is difficult to segment and locate precisely. Background suppression based-on wavelet transformation is proposed in the paper. Wavelet decomposition makes it possible to analyze a signal both in time and frequency domains. In the paper infrared sea and key background images are processed. For their SNR is low and background is complex, using wavelet transformation decomposes an original image and extract approximate feature to reconstruct an image, which mainly includes background information. A new image would be obtained using background image subtracted from original image. There are mainly target and noise points left in the new image. By setting proper threshold, the target can be detected perfectly. At last, experiment results are given and show the method is practical.