Anti-interference aircraft-tracking method in infrared imagery

In this paper, we focus on developing an algorithm for infrared-imaging guidance that enables the aircraft to be reliably tracked in the event of interference. The key challenge is to track the aircraft with occlusion caused by decoys and drastic appearance changes resulting from a diversity of attacking angles. To address this challenge, an aircraft-tracking algorithm was proposed, which provides robustness in tracking the aircraft against the decoys. We reveal the inherent structure and infrared signature of the aircraft, which are used as discriminative features to track the aircraft. The anti-interference method was developed based on simulated images but validate the effectiveness on both real infrared image sequences without decoys and simulated infrared imagery. For frequent occlusion caused by the decoys, the mechanism of occlusion detection is exploited according to the variation of the model distance in tracking process. To have a comprehensive evaluation of tracking performance, infrared-image sequences with different attack angles were simulated, and experiments on benchmark trackers were performed to quantitatively evaluate tracking performance. The experiment results demonstrate that our aircraft-tracking method performs favorably against state-of-the-art trackers.