Identification of military ground vehicles by feature information fusion in FLIR images

Abstract

Distance fourier descriptors of local target boundary and feature information fusion using multiple MLPs (multilayer perceptrons) are proposed. They are used to identify nonoccluded and partially occluded targets in natural FLIR (forward-looking infrared) images. After segmenting a target, radial fourier descriptors as global shape features are defined from the target boundary. A target boundary is partitioned into four local boundaries to extract local shape features. In a local boundary, a distance function is defined from boundary points and a line between two extreme points. Distance Fourier descriptors as local shape features are defined by using distance function. One global feature vector and four local feature vectors are used as input data for multiple MLPs to determine final identification result of the target. In the experiments, we show that the proposed method is superior to the traditional feature sets with respect to the identification performance.