Stray Light Nonuniform Background Elimination Method Based on Image Block Self-Adaptive Gray-Scale Morphology for Wide-Field Surveillance

Space-based wide-field surveillance systems are of great significance in maintaining the security of space resources by avoiding collisions between space targets. However, their performance is hindered by stray light phenomena. The nonuniform background noise caused by stray light significantly hampers subsequent target detection, leading to a high frequency of false alarms. To solve this problem, we propose a robust and accurate nonuniform background elimination method based on image block self-adaptive gray-scale morphology (IBSGM). First, we define two kinds of structural operators with different sizes and domains, which make full use of the difference between the target pixels and surrounding background pixels. Then, we block the original surveillance image and find the size of the largest target in each block by the minimum bounding rectangle method to determine the optimal size of the structural operator suitable for each block. Finally, we perform morphological processing using the defined structural operators to eliminate nonuniform backgrounds from images. Experimental results on simulated and real image datasets demonstrate that the proposed IBSGM method has higher precision in eliminating the nonuniform background when compared to other methods.