Enforcing Label and Intensity Consistency for IR Target Detection
This work addresses IR target detection for applications like surveillance, but it is incremental as it builds on existing MRF and background subtraction techniques.
The study tackled IR target detection by formulating it as a binary pixel classification problem using Markov Random Fields (MRF) with neighborhood dependencies on intensities and labels, achieving high performance on benchmark datasets.
This study formulates the IR target detection as a binary classification problem of each pixel. Each pixel is associated with a label which indicates whether it is a target or background pixel. The optimal label set for all the pixels of an image maximizes aposteriori distribution of label configuration given the pixel intensities. The posterior probability is factored into (or proportional to) a conditional likelihood of the intensity values and a prior probability of label configuration. Each of these two probabilities are computed assuming a Markov Random Field (MRF) on both pixel intensities and their labels. In particular, this study enforces neighborhood dependency on both intensity values, by a Simultaneous Auto Regressive (SAR) model, and on labels, by an Auto-Logistic model. The parameters of these MRF models are learned from labeled examples. During testing, an MRF inference technique, namely Iterated Conditional Mode (ICM), produces the optimal label for each pixel. The detection performance is further improved by incorporating temporal information through background subtraction. High performances on benchmark datasets demonstrate effectiveness of this method for IR target detection.