Computationally Efficient Ground-to-Air Missile Seeker Based on Camera Images

Recently, advanced ground-to-air missiles are developed to defend against a targeted aircraft. A conventional ground-to-air missile has infrared (IR) seekers or radar sensors. However, an anti-aircraft missile based on infrared images is easily distracted by flares, thus an aircraft deploys flares when an incoming missile is detected. In this paper, we propose a missile seeker that complements the weakness of the existing IR sensors, by switching to camera sensors in the case where IR sensors are disturbed. As we switch to camera sensors, we generate the initial bounding box by applying simple line detection algorithms on the target image. Once a bounding box is generated at the target aircraft, the box is tracked continuously using object trackers, which are based on camera images. The missile then uses the bounding box for tracking the target continuously. The object tracker is based on the camera image and is not disturbed by flares or chaffs. To the best of our knowledge, our paper is unique in proposing a missile seeker that complements the weakness of the existing IR sensors, by switching to camera sensors in the case where IR sensors are disturbed. The proposed tracking algorithm is simple and computationally efficient, thus is suitable for real time applications. As far as we know, our tracking algorithm is novel in using simple line detection algorithms for tracking a target aircraft. Using experiments, we show that the proposed tracking method outperforms the-state-of-the-art on object detector considering both time efficiency and tracking accuracy.