Enhanced Tracking of Airborne Targets Using Forward Looking Infrared Measurements.
Abstract
Considerable work has been accomplished at AFIT (Armed Forces Institute of Technology) in the last three years to improve the tracking capability of the high energy laser weapon. The improvements were achieved via use of an adaptive extended Kalman filter algorithm. In this research, work is initiated on a tracker able to handle 'multiple hot spot' targets, in which digital signal processing is employed on the FLIR data to identify the underlying target shape. This identified shape is then used in the measurement model portion of the filter as it estimates target offset from the center of the field-of-view. Two tracking algorithms are developed. The first algorithm uses an extended Kalman filter to process the intensity measurements form a FLIR to produce target position estimates. The second algorithm uses a linear Kalman filter to process the position estimates of an improved correlation algorithm. This algorithm is improved over standard correlators by using thresholding to eliminate poor correlation information, dynamic information from the Kalman filter and it also uses the on-line derived target shape. (Author)
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Dec 01, 1981
- Accession Number
- ADA115581
Entities
People
- Steven Keith Rogers
Organizations
- Air Force Institute of Technology