A two dimensional arma model for the simulation of IR backgrounds

Abstract

At the US Army Ballistic Research Laboratory (BRL), Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md., weapon system analysts use background models in order to: 1) establish ‘clutter’ thresholds for firing algorithms: and, 2) to study the masking and false alarm effect of background in their effort to evaluate the performance of various weapon systems. The BRL has received from US Army Engineer Waterways Experiment Station (WES) several large data bases comprised of blackbody temperatures derived from measurements obtained with an IR sensor. The sensor was mounted on a helicopter and scanned in the cross-track direction perpendicular to the direction of flight (in-track). The data consist of temperatures of scene elements (pixels) for a plowed field, a forested area, and a grassy field. The primary objective of this research is to provide a simple mathematical model which provides simulated data that are consistent with descriptive statistics from the original spatially correlated data base. Such statistics include the mean a...