Model-based target recognition in pulsed ladar imagery

A pulsed ladar based object-recognition system with applications to automatic target recognition (ATR) is presented. The approach used is to fit the sensed range images to range templates extracted through a laser physics based simulation applied to geometric target models. A projection-based prescreener filters out more than 80% of candidate templates. For recognition, an M of N pixel matching scheme for internal shape matching is combined with a silhouette matching scheme, The system was trained on synthetic data obtained from the simulation, and has been blind tested on a data set containing real ladar images of military vehicles at various orientations and ranges. Succesful blind testing on real imagery demonstrates the utility of synthetic imagery for training of recognizers operating on ladar imagery.