Forward-looking scene matching with RST invariant conformation based on fourier-mellin transform

Forward-looking scene matching is a fire-new technique for terminal guidance of intending precision-guided weapons. As conventional template matching methods can not overcome perspective transmutation of forward-looking imaging, a novel method based on Fourier-Mellin transform and phase-only correlation (FMPOC) is proposed in this paper. The FMPOC first employs the Fourier-Mellin magnitude to determine RST invariant of an image pair with its property of invariance to rotation and scale. Then, reconstruct real-time image with the computed rotation and scale parameters. Hereafter, phase-only correlation is used to find the final translations between reference image and the reconstructed image. Experiments over a range of RST attacks showed that the proposed method can obtain a significant improvement in matching capability compared with conventional cross-correlation matching, and this can be a good demonstration for deep research of forward-looking scene matching.