Small target detection using morphology and modified Gaussian distance function

We propose a new small target detection system that detects small target candidates based on morphology operations and detects actual targets using a modified Gaussian distance function. To reduce clutter on the edges of clouds, a median filter is applied as preprocessing. Two kinds of images are calculated with closing and opening morphological operators, respectively. In the morphology operations, various sizes of structure elements that are used to consider the sizes of targets and candidate targets are extracted from different images between the two images in the closing and opening operations. With a modified Gaussian distance function, small targets are detected from the candidate targets. The proposed method is less sensitive to clutters than existing methods and has a detection rate of 98%. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.