Efficient method of dim small target detection for scanning IR surveillance system

A mixed method of dim small target detection for scanning Infrared surveillance system based on area focal plane array (FPA) was presented. The method combined gray level morphology filter and target probability distribution function matching technique. The top-hat filter of gray level morphology could detect small targets defined by structure element efficiently. But detecting result of top-hat filter had a high false alarm ratio for discarding the intensity distribution information of target. The probability distribution function matching method used in mean-shift was imported for re-validating the detected targets. Results show that the presented method can restrain background clutter and reduce the false alarm ratio.