Abstract: A knotty problem in ultraviolet (UV) images processing is how to cancel the strong noise and burst interferences coming from UV CCD sensors and high gain amplifiers. The strong noise and burst interferences will influence detecting the missile targets in the UV images effectively. To solve the problem, without changing the existing UV CCD sensors, this paper develops a 3-D recursive filter for UV image sequences based on a 3-D IIR filter, which is stable and it extracts the faint targets fast and clearly. The proposed 3-D IIR filtering algorithm composes of a 2-D IIR spatial filter and 1-D IIR time filter. The proposed 3-D IIR filtering algorithm is of less computation amount for UV image sequences and it can realize fast or real-time filtering for UV images. The stability test algorithms for the 2-D spatial IIR and 1-D time IIR are provided. Simulation experiments of UV image processing verify that the proposed 3-D IIR filter and related algorithms are correct，effective and pragmatical.

Key words: ultraviolet image processing, 3D recursive filtering, missile target extraction, burst interference and strong noise