Target image tracking using a nonlinear filter based on Pontryagin minimum principle

The major contribution of this technical note is the introduction of a new nonlinear filter, based on Pontryagin minimum principle and the method of invariant imbedding, as applied to spatial filtering of FLIR image sequences. This filler is used to improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of each frame. The target center is then estimated using different approaches. It is shown, through Monte Carlo simulation, that the proposed methods improve the accuracy of the estimate of the target center by 100 pecent on the average, compared to the correlation algorithm.