Target detection in foveal ATR systems

Abstract

Automatic target recognition (ATR) applications require simultaneously a wide field of view (FOV) for better detection and situation awareness, high resolution for target recognition and threat assessment, and high frame rate for detecting brief events and disambiguating frame-to-frame correlation. Uniformly sampling the entire FOV at recognition resolution is simply wasteful in ATR scenarios with localized regions of interest (ROIs). Foveal data acquisition with space-variant sampling and context-sensitive sensor articulation is highly optimized for active ATR applications. We propose a multiscale local Zernike filter-based front end target detection technique for a commercially feasible foveal sensor topology with piecewise constant resolution profile. Anisotropic heat diffusion is employed for preprocessing of the foveal data. Expansion template matching is used to derive a detection filter that optimizes the discriminant signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Results are presented with simulated foveal imagery, derived from real uniform acuity FLIR data.