Enhanced Tracking of Airborne Targets Using a Correlator/Kalman Filter.

摘要

Over the past four years considerable work has been accomplished at the Air Force Institute of Technology to improve the tracking capability of the high energy laser weapon against airborne targets. In this research, many of the prior concepts are incorporated into a correlator/Kalman filter to develop a tracker capable of providing precise target position estimates in a dynamic shortrange environment using a Forward Looking Infrared sensor (FLIR) to provide measurement data. Digital signal processing in employed on the FLIR data to identify the underlying target intensity shape function when the target under consideration has either single or multiple hot spots. The estimated target shape function is then used as the template in a correlation algorithm, where spatial and frequency domain correlation techniques were explored, to determine the offsets between the template and the incoming measurement. These offsets are used as pseudomeasurements in a linear Kalman filter which exploits knowledge of the process dynamics and statistical knowledge of the correlator error to enhance the position estimates. (Author)