Small Low-Contrast Target Detection: Data-Driven Spatiotemporal Feature Fusion and Implementation

Detecting small low-contrast targets in the airspace is an essential and challenging task. This article proposes a simple and effective data-driven support vector machine (SVM)-based spatiotemporal feature fusion detection method for small low-contrast targets. We design a novel pixel-level feature, called a spatiotemporal profile, to depict the discontinuity of each pixel in the spatial and temporal domains The spatiotemporal profile is a local patch of the spatiotemporal feature maps concatenated by the spatial feature maps and temporal feature maps in channelwise, which are generated by the morphological black-hat filter and a ghost-free dark-focusing frame difference methods, respectively. Instead of the handcrafted feature fusion mechanisms in previous works, we use the labeled spatiotemporal profiles to train an SVM classifier to learn the spatiotemporal feature fusion mechanism automatically. To speed up detection for high-resolution videos, the serial SVM classification process on central processing units (CPUs) is reformed as parallel convolution operations on graphics processing unit (GPUs), which exhibits over 1000+ times speedup in our real experiments. Finally, blob analysis is applied to generate final detection results. Elaborate experiments are conducted, and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method performs better than 12 baseline methods for the small low-contrast target detection. The field tests manifest that the parallel implementation of the proposed method can realize real-time detection at 15.3 FPS for videos at a resolution of 2048×1536 and the maximum detection distance can reach 1 km for drones in sunny weather.