In this paper, a novel infrared target co-detection model combining the self-correlation features of backgrounds and the commonality features of targets in the spatio-temporal domain is proposed to detect small targets in a sequence of infrared images with complex backgrounds. Firstly, a dense target extraction model based on nonlinear weights is proposed, which can better suppress background of images and enhance small targets than weights of singular values. Secondly, a sparse target extraction model based on entry-wise weighted robust principal component analysis is proposed. The entry-wise weight adaptively incorporates structural prior in terms of local weighted entropy, thus, it can extract real targets accurately and suppress background clutters efficiently. Finally, the commonality of targets in the spatio-temporal domain are used to construct target refinement model for false alarms suppression and target confirmation. Since real targets could appear in both of the dense and sparse reconstruction maps of a single frame, and form trajectories after tracklet association of consecutive frames, the location correlation of the dense and sparse reconstruction maps for a single frame and tracklet association of the location correlation maps for successive frames have strong ability to discriminate between small targets and background clutters. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed small target co-detection method can not only suppress background clutters effectively, but also detect targets accurately even if with target-like interference.
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are able to achieve autonomous flight without drivers, and UAV has been a key tool to extract space data. Therefore, how to detect the trajectories of targets from UAV aerial image sequences is of great importance. Because local features are suitable to detect target tracking, we exploit scaleinvariant feature transform (SIFT) features to describe the interesting keypoints of targets. The main innovation of this paper is to utilize Multiple hypothesis tracking (MHT) algorithm to track an object (target) in a series of image sequences. Particularly, we develop a MHT framework based on a multidimensional assignment formulation and a sliding time window policy. To obtain target tracking from UAV aerial image sequences, three steps should be done, that is, 1) Breaking each track set into tracklet at a specific time, 2) Estimating the association cost of each track set, 3) Merging trajectory fragments to a longer one iteratively. Finally, we collect several UAV aerial image sequences with different target density to construct a dataset, and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
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