Automatic target tracking using global motion compensation and fringe-adjusted joint transform correlation

Abstract

The performance of a target tracking algorithm is directly related to global motion compensation performance, if the imaging sensor systems are not stable. Especially, forward looking infra-red (FLIR) video sequences are detrimentally affected by camera motion since the infrared camera mounted on an airborne platform suffer from abrupt discontinuities in motion. Since this global motion could cause the movement of the target outside the operational limits of the tracking algorithm, each frame in FLIR sequences has to be recovered by motion estimation technique. In this paper, a normalized cross correlation based template matching algorithm has been developed to accurately estimate and compensate the global motion before the application of the tracking algorithm. Then, the automatic target tracking algorithm has been applied using fringe-adjusted joint transform correlator (FJTC) based target detection and tracking technique.