Infrared Maritime Small-Target Detection Based on Fusion Gray Gradient Clutter Suppression

The long-distance ship target turns into a small spot in an infrared image, which has the characteristics of small size, weak intensity, limited texture information, and is easily affected by noise. Moreover, the presence of heavy sea clutter, including sun glints that exhibit local contrast similar to small targets, negatively impacts the performance of small-target detection methods. To address these challenges, we propose an effective detection scheme called fusion gray gradient clutter suppression (FGGCS), which leverages the disparities in grayscale and gradient between the target and its surrounding background. Firstly, we designed a harmonic contrast map (HCM) by using the two-dimensional difference of Gaussian (2D-DoG) filter and eigenvalue harmonic mean of the structure tensor to highlight high-contrast regions of interest. Secondly, a local gradient difference measure (LGDM) is designed to distinguish isotropic small targets from background edges with local gradients in a specific direction. Subsequently, by integrating the HCM and LGDM, we designed a fusion gray gradient clutter suppression map (FGGCSM) to effectively enhance the target and suppress clutter from the sea background. Finally, an adaptive constant false alarm threshold is adopted to extract the targets. Extensive experiments on five real infrared maritime image sequences full of sea glints, including a small target and sea–sky background, show that FGGCS effectively increases the signal-to-clutter ratio gain (SCRG) and the background suppression factor (BSF) by more than 22% and 82%, respectively. Furthermore, its receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve has an obviously more rapid convergence rate than those of other typical detection algorithms and improves the accuracy of small-target detection in complex maritime backgrounds.