Model-based target recognition in pulsed ladar imagery

A pulsed laser radar (ladar) based object recognition system with applications to automatic target recognition is reported. The approach used is to fit the sensed range images to the range templates extracted using laser physics based simulation of Computer Aided Design target models. A projection based pre-screener filters out more than 80 percent of candidate templates. An M of N pixel matching scheme for internal shape matching combined with a silhouette matching scheme is used for recognition. The system has been blind tested on a data set containing 276 real ladar images of military vehicles at various orientations and different ranges. The system achieves above 90 percent accuracy in recognition of 0.4 meters resolution ladar images