Spatiotemporal difference-of-Gaussians filters for robust infrared small target tracking in various complex scenes

Tracking infrared (IR) small targets is a vital component of many computer vision applications, including IR precise guidance, early warning, and IR remote sensing. Various complicated scenes, however, present significant challenges to the tracking task. To solve this problem, we present a novel 3D spatiotemporal difference-of-Gaussians (DoG) filter-based algorithm for tracking small targets in IR videos of various complex scenes. First, biologically inspired 3D DoG filters are proposed for IR small target tracking, which are capable of accounting for spatial and temporal information. Then, based on such filters, an effective and robust tracker is constructed to track the small targets, which are spatiotemporally distinguishable from background clutter. Extensive experiments show that our approach tracks the small targets accurately and robustly in realistic IR videos of complex backgrounds that present unique difficulties to other approaches. (C) 2015 Optical Society of America