Research on an Infrared Multi-Target Saliency Detection Algorithm under Sky Background Conditions

Aiming at solving the problem of incomplete saliency detection and unclear boundaries in infrared multi-target images with different target sizes and low signal-to-noise ratio under sky background conditions, this paper proposes a saliency detection method for multiple targets based on multi-saliency detection. The multiple target areas of the infrared image are mainly bright and the background areas are dark. Combining with the multi-scale top hat (Top-hat) transformation, the image is firstly corroded and expanded to extract the subtraction of light and shade parts and reconstruct the image to reduce the interference of sky blurred background noise. Then the image obtained by a multi-scale Top-hat transformation is transformed from the time domain to the frequency domain, and the spectral residuals and phase spectrum are extracted directly to obtain two kinds of image saliency maps by multi-scale Gauss filtering reconstruction, respectively. On the other hand, the quaternion features are extracted directly to transform the phase spectrum, and then the phase spectrum is reconstructed to obtain one kind of image saliency map by the Gauss filtering. Finally, the above three saliency maps are fused to complete the saliency detection of infrared images. The test results show that after the experimental analysis of infrared video photographs and the comparative analysis of Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve and Area Under the Curve (AUC) index, the infrared image saliency map generated by this method has clear target details and good background suppression effect, and the AUC index performance is good, reaching over 99%. It effectively improves the multi-target saliency detection effect of the infrared image under the sky background and is beneficial to subsequent detection and tracking of image targets.