Detectability of infrared small targets

Selecting the most appropriate algorithms for detecting small targets in varied infrared image scenes is frequently needed, since the relative characteristics between small targets and backgrounds in varied scenes are disparate. To solve that problem, a novel criterion is proposed in this article to measure the difficulty in distinguishing small targets from infrared images, which is named detectability of infrared small targets (DIST). Then a new method to detect small targets based on it was introduced. Detection probability and false alarm probability were employed to evaluate the performance. The results from the experiments further demonstrated the robustness of the proposed methodology under different backgrounds.