An Algorithm for Target Detection, Identification, Tracking and Estimation of Motion for Passive Homing Missile Autopilot Guidance

Abstract

The autonomous weapons which can identify the correct targets without any human intervention are in demand with the development of defense and war scenarios. The dynamics of the flight path is decided by the missile guidance system to achieve different types of mission objectives. Image processing equipped with intelligent sensors can identify any type of target other than traditional method of detection of only fire (aircrafts) or other signatures. The guidance system through image processing can differentiate between targets and can provide the latest error correction in the flight path. For detecting a particular object within an image, detection using point feature method is much effective technique. The point feature matching is done by comparing various correspondence points of object and analyzing the points between cluttered scene images to find a required object of interest in image. An algorithm which works on finding correspondence points between a target and reference images and detecting a particular object (target) is proposed in this paper. Tracking of object and estimation of motion model is also proposed by taking constant velocity and constant turn rate model. The real performance can be achieved by identifying the target in image using this detection approach and estimation of its motion.