Invariant fringe-adjusted joint transform correlation-based target tracking in FLIR sequences

Presented in this paper is a fringe-adjusted joint transform correlator (FJTC) based invariant target tracking of forwar looking infra-red (FLIR) image sequences. The proposed FJTC based tracking approach employed a modified synthetic discriminant function (SDF) concept together with an efficient camera motion compensation technique to accommodate the problem of target signature variation due to in-plane/out-of-plane rotations, scale variations, noise, and bad frames. The proposed technique can track small objects comprising of only a few pixels and is capable of compensating the high ego-motion of the sensor. The robustness of the proposed technique is demonstrated with computer simulation performed on sequences of eal life FLIR imagery taken from an airborne moving platform.