On-Board Flickering Pixel Dynamic Suppression Method Based on Multi-Feature Fusion

The blind pixel suppression is the key preprocess to guarantee the real-time space-based infrared point target (IRPT) detection and tracking. Meanwhile, flickering pixels, as one of the blind pixels, is hard to suppress because of randomness. At present, common methods adopting a single feature generally need to accumulate dozens or hundreds of frames to ensure detection accuracy, which cannot update flickering pixels frequently. However, with low detection frequency, the flickering pixels are easily miss detected. In this paper, we propose an on-board flickering pixel dynamic suppression method based on multi-feature fusion. The visual and motion features of flickering pixels are extracted from the result of IRPT detection and tracking. Then, the confidence of flickering pixel evaluation strategy and selection mechanism of flickering pixel are introduced to fuse the above features, which achieves accurate flickering pixel suppression using a dozen frames. The experimental results evaluated on the real image of four scenarios show that the blind pixel false detection rate of the proposed method is no more than 1.02%. Meanwhile, evaluated on the simulated image, the flickering pixel miss suppression rate is no more than 2.38%, and the flickering pixel false suppression rate is 0. The proposed method could be an addition to most other IRPT detection methods, which guarantees the near-real-time and reliability of on-board IRPT detection applications.