Infrared Maritime Small Target Detection Based on Multidirectional Uniformity and Sparse-Weight Similarity

Infrared maritime target detection is a key technology in the field of maritime search and rescue, which usually requires high detection accuracy. Despite the promising progress of principal component analysis methods, it is still challenging to detect small targets of unknown polarity (bright or dark) with strong edge interference. Using the partial sum of tubal nuclear norm to estimate low-rank background components and weighted l1 norm to estimate sparse components is an effective method for target extraction. In order to suppress the strong edge interference, considering that the uniformity of the target scattering field is significantly higher than that of the background scattering field in the eigenvalue of the structure tensor, a prior weight based on the multidirectional uniformity of structure tensor eigenvalue was proposed and applied to the optimization model. In order to detect targets with unknown polarity, the images with opposite polarity were substituted into the optimization model, respectively, and the sparse-weight similarity is used to judge the polarity of the target. In order to make the method more efficient, the polarity judgment is made in the second iteration, and then, the false iteration will stop. The proposed method is compared with nine advanced baseline methods on 14 datasets and shows significant strong robustness, which is beneficial to engineering applications.