Regularized CDWT optical flow applied to moving-target detection in IR imagery

Abstract.

A modified version of the CDWT optical flow algorithm developed by Magarey and Kingsbury is applied to the problem of moving-target detection in noisy infrared image sequences, in the case where the sensor is also moving. Frame differencing is used to detect pixel-size targets moving in strongly cluttered backgrounds. To compensate for sensor motion, prior to differencing, the background is registered spatially using the estimated motion field between the frames. Results of applying the method to three image sequences show that the target SNR is higher when the estimated motion field for the whole scene is explicitly regularized. A comparison with another optical flow algorithm is also presented.