Infrared small target detection based on region proposal and CNN classifier

Infrared small target detection has been a challenging task due to the weak radiation intensity of targets and the complexity of the background. Traditional methods using hand-designed features are usually effective for specific background and have the problems of low detection rate and high false alarm rate in complex infrared scene. In order to fully exploit the features of infrared image, this paper proposes an infrared small target detection method based on region proposal and convolution neural network. Firstly, the small target intensity is enhanced according to the local intensity characteristics. Then, potential target regions are proposed by corner detection to ensure high detection rate of the method. Finally, the potential target regions are fed into the classifier based on convolutional neural network to eliminate the non-target regions, which can effectively suppress the complex background clutter. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively reduce the false alarm rate, and outperform other state-of-the-art methods in terms of subjective visual impression and quantitative evaluation metrics.