Second order morphology algorithm for IR small target enhancement in sea clutter background

The framework of a second order morphology algorithm is proposed to enhance the dim small infrared target in sea clutter background with strong detector noise. First, a morphological filters bank is given. Each filter in the bank is designed to suppress its corresponding type texture. The second order process can be accomplished in two steps. The original infrared image is first filtered using each filter separately, and then the first order result is obtained by the combination of the filtered result images. The other step is essentially the same as the first one except the combination manner of the filtered result images. Second, the traditional SNR gain based evaluation of different small target enhancement algorithms is examined and a more reasonable method based on the distance between the target and the maximal background (DTMB) is described in this paper. Third, using the new evaluation method, the comparison is given by experiment through a sequence of infrared images with a dim small target. Experimental results demonstrate that the new proposed algorithm performs better in sea clutter background with strong detector noise than the traditional ones.