Target tracking using infrared measurements and laser illumination

Author

Maybeck, Peter ; Herrera, Theodore D. ; Evans, Roger J.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Air Force Inst. of Technol., Wright-Patterson AFB, OH, USA

Volume

30

Issue

3

fYear

1994

fDate

7/1/1994 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

758

Lastpage

768

Abstract

A missile target tracker is designed using a filter/correlator (with adaptive target shape identification) based on forward-looking infrared (FLIR) sensor measurements to track the center-of-intensity of the hardbody/plume combination, and another filter using Doppler and/or speckle information in the return from a low-power laser illuminator to estimate the offset between the intensity centroid and the hardbody center-of-mass. The Doppler information is shown to yield smaller bias and error variance from the tracker than the speckle information. Performance of trackers based on just Doppler or both Doppler and speckle information from the laser return is portrayed as a function of important parameters in the tracking environment

Keywords

Doppler effect; Kalman filters; Monte Carlo methods; correlation methods; infrared detectors; linear systems; military computing; missiles; parameter estimation; performance evaluation; signal processing equipment; speckle; FFT; FLIR; adaptive target shape identification; center-of-intensity; error variance; filter/correlator; forward-looking infrared sensor; hardbody center-of-mass; hardbody/plume; infrared measurement; intensity centroid; laser illumination; laser illuminator; laser return; missile target tracker; offset; speckle information; Adaptive filters; Information filtering; Information filters; Infrared sensors; Lighting; Missiles; Optical design; Shape measurement; Speckle; Target tracking;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Aerospace and Electronic Systems, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9251

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/7.303745

Filename

303745