Adaptive mean and variance filter for detection of dim point-like targets

The problem of detecting small target in IR imagery has attracted much research effort over the past few decades. As opposed to early detection algorithms which detect targets spatially in each image and then apply tracking algorithm, more recent approaches have used multiple frames to incorporate temporal as well as spatial information. They often referred to as track before detect algorithms. This approach has shown promising results particularly for detection of dim point-like targets. However, the computationally complexity has prohibited practical usage for such algorithms. This paper presents an adaptive, recursive and computation efficient detection method. This detection algorithm updates parameters and detects occurrence of targets as new frame arrived without storing previous frames, thus achieved recursiveness. Besides, the target temporal intensity change is modeled by two Gaussian distribution with different mean and variance. The derivation of this generalized model has taken account of the wide variation of target speed, therefore detects wider range of targets.