Glint Reduction in Staring Focal Plane Array Mid-Wave Thermal Imagers Employing Microscanning

The problem of efficient clutter suppression is a challenge for shipboard IRST systems that have to provide reliable detection/tracking of cruise missiles in sea glint. In such systems, reliable target tracking is impossible without clutter rejection down to the level of sensor noise. The proposal is geared towards development of novel parametric and nonparametric spatial-temporal techniques for clutter rejection and image stabilization; nonlinear filtering techniques for track-before-detect and tracking; improving performance of the clutter filtering and jitter compensation algorithms; development of a bank of clutter suppression/stabilization filters with outlier compensation and an adaptive, reconfigurable architecture; and testing/demonstrating the capabilities of the developed technology in realistic environments. It is demonstrated that the proposed spatial-temporal methods are particularly efficient for target detection/tracking in difficult scenarios when spatial-only filters completely fail. The developed software imbedded into a GUI interface will constitute a powerful tool for the optimization of operational target detection/tracking systems in conditions of interest. These software tools will be also capable of predicting the performance and reducing to a minimum the time needed to search for an "optimal" system configuration in NAVY programs/systems.