Infrared small target enhancement based on variance difference

In surveillance and early warning systems, the enhancement of targets is a very important stage for the high reliability detection and tracking in Infrared images with complex backgrounds. In order to enhance small targets in an Infrared image and suppress the background clutter, consequently increasing the contrast between them, this paper proposes a method using a model for the target area with a three-layer patch-image model and based on the difference between the variance of the layers in the neighboring areas of the investigated pixel. Results of the experiments indicate that the proposed method is quite effective on the enhancement of small targets as well as suppression of the background clutter in IR images with a minimum false alarm rate. This is realized while the runtime of the proposed method is minimal compared to other commonly used methods, which makes it effective to be used in real time applications.