Dim moving target detection against sky background in IR image sequence based on GLRT

According to the problem of detecting a dim moving target with unknown target amplitude, position and velocity from IR image sequence, the corresponding simplified binary measurement signal model was built, assuming that the target intensity was constant and the target keeps uniform motion in a straight line. Based on the simplified binary measurement signal model, the composite hypothesis testing problem was approached by means of the generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) theory. The detector structure and its actual implementation based on velocity filters were discussed in detail. Approximated expressions of the false alarm and detection probabilities were obtained and validated by means of computer simulation. To test the effectiveness of the detection algorithm, the detection results obtained on a set of real IR image sequence were presented and discussed. These results indicate that the proposed algorithm can obtain a good performance on dim moving target detection with low SNR.