Closely Spaced Target Detection using Intensity Sorting-based Context Awareness

Detecting remote targets is important to active protection system (APS) or infrared search and track (IRST) applications. In normal situation, the well-known constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detector works properly. However, decoys in APS or closely spaced targets in IRST degrade the detection capability by increasing background noise level in the CFAR detector. This paper presents a context aware CFAR detector by the intensity sorting and selection of background region to reduce the effect of neighboring targets that lead to incorrect estimation of background statistics. The existence of neighboring targets can be recognized by intensity sorting where neighboring targets usually show highest ranks. The proposed background statistics (mean, standard deviation) estimation method from median local pixels can be aware of the background context and reduce the effects of the neighboring targets, which increase the signal-to-clutter ratio. The experimental results on the synthetic APS sequence, real adjacent target sequence, and remote pedestrian sequence validated that the proposed method produced an enhanced detection rate with the same false alarm rate compared with the hysteresis-CFAR (H-CFAR) detection.