Using deep learning to detect small targets in infrared oversampling images

According to the oversampling imaging characteristics, an infrared small target detection method based on deep learning is proposed. A 7-layer deep convolutional neural network (CNN) is designed to automatically extract small target features and suppress clutters in an end-to-end manner. The input of CNN is an original oversampling image while the output is a clutter-suppressed feature map. The CNN contains only convolution and non-linear operations, and the resolution of the output feature map is the same as that of the input image. The L1-norm loss function is used, and a mass of training data is generated to train the network effectively. Results show that compared with several baseline methods, the proposed method improves the signal clutter ratio gain and background suppression factor by 3 - 4 orders of magnitude, and has more powerful target detection performance.