Dim small target detection based on high-order cumulant of motion estimation

To improve the detection ability of dim targets in strong clutter background, a new non-uniform correction method of ring perturbation in sequence images is proposed to remove the non-uniformity of images, and then the multi-frame cumulation technique is used to enhance the dim targets. Finally, on the basis of pre-processing, Poisson distribution is used to obtain candidate target images in advance, next use the high-order cumulant for further extract, and to process the detection results of the above two algorithms by AND operation to obtain the common candidate target points. With that, the motion estimation was made on the dim target to make accumulation along the estimated direction in order to enhance the signal of the dim small target. Experiments show that the proposed ring perturbation correction method can effectively improve the local signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of dim small targets; in sequence image detection, the proposed algorithm in this paper achieves better detection results than other algorithms, and can effectively detect dim small targets in strong clutter background.