A Method For IR Point Target Detection Based on Spatial-temporal Bilateral Filter

The problem of detecting and locating point targets in cluttered and noised IR (infrared) images is a difficult and important task in IR applications. In this paper, we proposed a new method for detecting dim moving point target in IR image sequence. The significance of this work is that the ideal of bilateral filtering is adopted, which leads to a simple detection. In order to make use of the temporal information of IR sequence, we extended the conventional 2D bilateral filter to the 3D spatial-temporal bilateral filter, which can remove noise efficiently and enhance the contrast between targets and background. The filter can finish the preprocessing job within three frames, which is important for real-time application for fast moving target detection. The limited qualitative results in the experiments demonstrate that the new method can produce an accurate result