Engineering Commons^™

Detection Of Unresolved Target Tracks In Infrared Imagery, Sarah A. Rajala, Loren W. Nolte, James V. Aanstoos

Sarah A. Rajala

Two methods for detecting dim, unresolved target tracks in infrared imagery are presented. Detecting such targets in a sequence of noisy images is very challenging from the standpoint of algorithm design as well as detection performance evaluation. Since the signal-to-noise ratio per pixel is very low (a dim target) and the target is unresolved (of spatial extent less than a pixel), one must rely on integration over target tracks which span over many image frames. In addition, since there is a large amount of uncertainty as to the pattern and location of target tracks, good algorithms must consider a large …