Multispectral optical Sensor System for Detection and Identification of Low Contrast and Camouflaged Objects

Physical Optics Corporation (POC), R&D Division, proposes to develop a multispectral optical sensor system built around an acousto-optic tunable filter (AOTF), for the detection and identification of camouflaged objects. Combined with an existing POC algorithm for translation-, rotation-, and scale-invariant object identification, this airborne sensor system will greatly enhance the ability of an AOTF to discover camouflaged objects in various backgrounds. The proposed sensor system will utilize the unique ability of an AOTF to vary its transmission bandwidth depending on the frequency spectrum of the driving signal and to make it correspond to the reflection spectrum of the object being tracked. The development of this sensor system and the image processing algorithms will bring automatic target recognition to a level where its ability to discriminate camouflaged objects will, for the first time, exceed that of a human operator.