A new TBD-DP algorithm using multiple IR sensors to locate the target launch point

Abstract

ABSTRACT Moving target tracking in an infrared (IR) image sequence under high clutter and noise power has been recentlyunder intensive investigation, and the track-before-detect (TBD) technique based-on dynamic programming (DP)is known to be especially attractive in very low SNR environments (3dB). In this paper we present a novel 3-dimensioanl(3D) TBD-DP technique using multiple IR image sensors. Our approach, which does not requirea separate image registration step, uses the pixel intensity values read o jointly from multiple image frames,to compute the merit function value required in the DP process. To overcome the computation burden relatedwith the 3D TBD-DP process, we also propose a novel technique that progressively changes the resolution orthe level-of-detail (LOD) of the image. And we analysis the detection performance of these algorithm, detectionprobability P d and false alarm probability P FA . Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithmhas good track detection performance with the computation load of less than an order of magnitude comparedwith the straight-forward 3D TBD-DP, not employing the LOD technique.Keywords: 3D track before detect (TBD), LOD technique, performance analysis