Tracking of unresolved targets in infrared imagery using a projection-based method
Jaeho Choi, Sarah A. Rajala · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1992
The conventional two-dimensional Hough transform technique is generalized into a projection- based transform method by using the modified Radon transform for estimating a three- dimensional target tracks embedded in a time-sequential set of image frames. The target of concern are dim, unresolved point targets moving along straight paths across a same field of view. Since the target signal-to-noise is low and the spatial extend of the target is less than a pixel, one must rely on integration over a target track which span over many image frames. Instead of processing the entire 3-D data set, a set of projections are taken using the modified 3-D Radon transform. The projection frames are processed further to extract the track parameters using the Hough transform. This projection-based method not only lowers the data dimensionality but maintains a comparable estimation performance to that of using the entire 3-D data by successfully incorporating all available knowledge obtained from the set of projections. The simulation results are presented for the synthetic and real infrared image sequences containing synthetically generated 3-D target tracks under various signal-to-noise conditions.