Localization of a point target from an optical sensor's focal plane array

Abstract

This paper considers the localization of a point target from an optical sensor's focal plane array (FPA) with a dead zone separating neighboring pixels. The Cramer Rao lower bound (CRLB) for the covariance of the maximum likelihood estimate (MLE) of target location is derived based on the assumptions that the energy density of the target deposited in the FPA conforms to a Gaussian point spread function (PSF) and that the pixel noise is based on a Poisson model (i.e., the mean and variance in each pixel are proportional to the pixel area), . Extensive simulation results are provided to demonstrate the efficiency of the MLE of the target location in the FPA. Furthermore, we investigate how the estimation performance changes with the pixel size for a given dead zone width. It is shown that that there is an optimal pixel size which minimizes the CRLB for a given dead zone width.