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

摘要

Moving target tracking in an infrared (IR) image sequence under high clutter and noise power has been recently under 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 require a separate image registration step, uses the pixel intensity values read off jointly from multiple image frames, to compute the merit function value required in the DP process. To overcome the computation burden related with the 3D TBD-DP process, we also propose a novel technique that progressively changes the resolution or the level-of-detail (LOD) of the image. And we analysis the detection performance of these algorithm, detection probability P_d and false alarm probability P_(FA). Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has good track detection performance with the computation load of less than an order of magnitude compared with the straight-forward 3D TBD-DP, not employing the LOD technique.