Antivibration pipeline-filtering algorithm for maritime small target detection

Abstract

© 2014 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). When searching for small targets at sea based on an infrared imaging system, irregular and random vibration of the airborne imaging platform causes intense interference for the pipeline-filtering, which is an algorithm that performs well in detecting small targets but is particularly sensitive to interframe vibrations of sequence images. This paper puts forward a pipeline-filtering algorithm that has a good performance on self-adaptive antivibration. In the block matching method that combines the normalized cross-correlations coefficient with the normalized mutual information, the interframe vibration of sequence images is acquired in real time and used to correct coordinates of the single-frame detection results, and then the corrected detection results are used to complete the pipeline-filtering. In addition, under severe sea conditions, small targets at sea may disappear transiently, leading to missing detection. This algorithm is also able to resolve this problem. Experimental results show that the algorithm can overcome the problem of interframe vibration of sequence images, thus realizing accurate detection of small maritime targets.