Experimental Evaluation of FLIR ATR Approaches—A Comparative Study

This paper presents an empirical evaluation of a number of recently developed Automatic Target Recognition algorithms for Forward-Looking Infrared (FLIR) imagery using a large database of real FLIR images. The algorithms evaluated are based on convolutional neural networks (CNN), principal component analysis (PCA), linear discriminant analysis (LDA), learning vector quantization (LVQ), modular neural networks (MNN), and two model-based algorithms, using Hausdorff metric-based matching and geometric hashing. The evaluation results show that among the neural approaches, the LVQ- and MNN-based algorithms perform the best; the classical LDA and the PCA methods and our implementation of the geometric hashing method ended up in the bottom three, with the CNN- and Hausdorff metric-based methods in the middle. Analyses show that the less-than-desirable performance of the approaches is mainly due to the lack of a good training set.