A foveal vision based approach to ATR

Unlike traditional automatic target recognition (ATR) approaches, the foveal vision based approach uses a foveated sensor to dynamically allocate visual resolution spatially and temporally to objects relevant to the task. It mimics human eye movements to find “attractive” regions quickly and accurately. A software demonstration system has been built based on the foveal vision approach and tested on a variety of sensor data including TV, infrared (IR), and laser radar (LADAR). Test results indicated that the foveal vision based approach not only supports a decrease of several orders of magnitude in the amount of data processing but also provides an increased ability to discriminate targets