Hee-Yul LEE, Tae-Hun KIM, and Kil-Houm PARK^*

School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Kyungpook National University, Daegu 702-701, Korea

(Received June 16, 2011; Accepted July 26, 2011)

In this paper, a target extraction method in forward-looking infrared (FLIR) images based on fuzzy thresholding which used local characteristics, bi-modality and adjacency, is proposed. The bi-modality represents how a pixel is classified into a part of a target using distribution of pixel values in a local region, and the adjacency is a measure to represent how far each pixel is from the target region. Segmentation is processed by the following: First, membership values for each pixel are calculated using bi-modality and adjacency. Second, fuzzy thresholding is performed to extract the target from the background. Finally, we extract the precise target in the thresholded image by post-processing. To evaluate the performance of the proposed target extraction method, we compare the proposed method with other segmentation methods using various FLIR images. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has good segmentation performance.

Key words: FLIR image, segmentation, bi-modality, Chamfer distance

^*E-mail address: khpark@ee.knu.ac.kr