Minimum average correlation energy (MACE) filters have been shown to be an effective generalization of the synthetic discriminant function (SDF) approach to automatic target recognition. The MACE filter has the advantage of having a very low false alarm rate, but suffers from a diminished probability of detection. Several generalizations have recently been proposed to maintain the low false alarm rate while increasing the probability of detection. The mathematical formulation of the MACE filter can be decomposed into a linear `prefilter' followed by an SDF-like operation. It is the prefiltering portion of the MACE which accounts for the low false alarm rate. In this paper, we insert a nonlinearity in this process by replacing the SDF portion of the operation by a neural network and show that we can increase the probability of detection without sacrificing low false alarm rates. This approach is demonstrated on a standard multiaspect image set and compared to the MACE and its generalizations.

Date Published: 29 July 1994
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 2234, Automatic Object Recognition IV, (29 July 1994);

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 2234:
Automatic Object Recognition IV
Firooz A. Sadjadi, Editor(s)