An infrared dim and small target image preprocessing algorithm based on improved bilateral filtering

There is no obvious shape and texture information of the infrared dim and small target in the air background, which is easy to be interfered by complex background clutter, so it brings great difficulty to target detection and tracking. A preprocessing algorithm based on bilateral filtering is proposed according to the characteristics of infrared dim and small target image in this paper. Firstly, The Butterworth high pass filter is used to process the original infrared image to remove the low-frequency noise. Then, the processed image is filtered by the windowed bilateral filter to predict the image background. Finally, the high pass filter processed result and the image background prediction result are differentiated to achieve the suppression of background clutter interference. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively preprocess the infrared dim target image in the sky background, and achieve good background suppression effect.