Enhancing Small Moving Target Detection Performance in Low-Quality and Long-Range Infrared Videos Using Optical Flow Techniques

Abstract

The detection of small moving objects in long-range infrared videos is challenging due to background clutter, air turbulence, and small target size. In this paper, we summarize the investigation of efficient ways to enhance the performance of small target detection in long-range and low-quality infrared videos containing moving objects. In particular, we focus on unsupervised, modular, flexible, and efficient methods for target detection performance enhancement using motion information extracted from optical flow methods. Three well-known optical flow methods were studied. It was found that optical flow methods need to be combined with contrast enhancement, connected component analysis, and target association in order to be effective for target detection. Extensive experiments using long-range mid-wave infrared (MWIR) videos from the Defense Systems Information Analysis Center (DSIAC) dataset clearly demonstrated the efficacy of our proposed approach.

Keywords

• infrared videos
• small target detection
• optical flow
• infrared videos
• long range