A Infrared Small Moving Object Extraction Method in the Context of Complex Background Motion

The detection of small moving target in the context of complex background is a difficult issue. A method combining interframe differential registration and adaptive wiener filtering aimed to suppress background to detect moving object in complex background is proposed. The fixed background in the fore-and-aft frames can be filtered out by the interframe registration which preserves the moving target, parts of background and noise due to interframe movement and the gray-scale fluctuation. On one hand the complex background is estimated by an adaptive wiener filter, and the background suppression leaves the high-frequency regions containing the moving target in image. On the other hand, most of the high-frequency regions corresponding to non-target area are eliminated by the inter-frame registration in the differential images. The motion of target is continual in image sequences, while the position of the leaked background is relatively fixed and the noise is of small size. The fusion of the background suppression and inter-frame registration makes the discrimination of targets, background and noise possible. The small moving target is detected by trajectory association based on its interframe trajectory continuity. Experiment results verify the feasibility of the method.