Detection and tracking of RC model aircraft in LWIR microgrid polarimeter data

The LWIR microgrid Polarized InfraRed Advanced Tactical Experiment (PIRATE) sensor was used to image several types of RC model aircraft at varying ranges and speeds under different background conditions. The data were calibrated and preprocessed using recently developed microgrid processing algorithms prior to estimation of the thermal (s₀) and polarimetric (s₁ and s₂) Stokes vector images. The data were then analyzed to assess the utility of polarimetric information when the thermal s0 data is augmented with s₁ and s₂ information for several model aircraft detection and tracking scenarios. Multi-variate analysis tools were applied in conjunction with multi-hypothesis detection schemes to assess detection performance of the aircraft under different background clutter conditions. We find that polarization is able to improve detection performance when compared with the corresponding thermal data in nearly all cases. A tracking algorithm was applied to a sequence of s₀ and corresponding degree of linear polarization (DoLP) images. An initial assessment was performed to determine whether polarization information can provide additional utility in these tracking scenarios.