Hyperspectral Mutli-Target Feature-Aided Tracking

Military operations in urban warfare provide an added emphasis to effectively detect, track, and ID ground targets in challenging environments. Given the high dynamic nature of ground targets and the ambiguity that may result from closely spaced targets, incorporation of feature data from sensors such as hyperpsectral imagery (HSI) cameras provides a means to disambiguate the detection and tracking of these targets. The benefit of using these sensors in multi-target detection and tracking is the ability to build feature models for target tracks based on the spectral and spatial information over multiple wavelengths. The video-based tracking community has demonstrated the ability to resolve closely spaced targets by incorporating color features versus intensity data alone. The addition of 20 to 200 additional wavelengths has the potential to significantly improve target detection and tracking to distinguish among targets. The Phase I effort will develop and demonstrate an innovative multiple target feature-aided tracking system and a hierarchical detection process supported by novel detection techniques. The system will focus on HSI feature-aided tracking of multiple targets in an urban setting using both real and simulated data.