A Novel Method for Detecting Small Target in Infrared Clutter

Detecting small target in clutter is usually carried out by using a predictor to suppress the background clutter. As an important part of clutter, noise can not be predicted accurately. Because the input value of the predicted point carries the information of noise, here a new method of background prediction algorithm is presented in this paper, which uses the input value of the predicted point to modify the prediction value by a weighted summation. The weight is determined by the homogeneity of the predicted point and its area ratio to the prediction region. The performance of this new method is analyzed theoretically. Experimental results indicated that this method has good effect on suppression of background clutter and reduction of the noise interference. The signal-to-clutter ratio of the images processed by this new method is improved almost 3 times than the conventional algorithms processed directly by predictors in testing.