Detecting aircraft with a low resolution infrared sensor

We propose a new method, based on level sets, to detect aircraft on low resolution infrared images. Aircraft correspond to hot temperatures at the sensor level. Hence it is natural to rely on a test that considers the hottest pixels in the sensed image. If these pixels are close, they are likely to come from a target (i.e., an aircraft); otherwise they belong to the clutter. Instead of manually testing the neighborhood of each hot pixel, we use level sets; this is the first contribution of the paper (corresponding to eq. 2). The other contribution is the calibration of the resulting test. The method is implemented and tested over a database containing 45 604 simulated aircraft images and provides 98.5% of correct detections.