Target-acquisition performance in undersampled infrared imagers: static imagery to motion video

In this research we show that the target-acquisition performance of an undersampled imager improves with sensor or target motion. We provide an experiment designed to evaluate the improvement in observer performance as a function of target motion rate in the video. We created the target motion by mounting a thermal imager on a precision two-axis gimbal and varying the sensor motion rate from 0.25 to 1 instantaneous field of view per frame. A midwave thermal imager was used to permit short integration times and remove the effects of motion blur. It is shown that the human visual system performs a superresolution reconstruction that mitigates some aliasing and provides a higher (than static imagery) effective resolution. This process appears to be relatively independent of motion velocity. The results suggest that the benefits of superresolution reconstruction techniques as applied to imaging systems with motion may be limited.