Texas Instruments feels that the development of Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) technology offers the potential for substantial performance improvements in future weapons systems. The ability to automatically find and launch weapons against targets in military environments will relieve attack aircraft or helicopter pilots of a demanding assignment in a high-stress environment, thereby improving their effectiveness and survivability. Future guided missiles can have ATRs aboard and thereby have the ability to autonomously find their own targets. In that case, launch platforms will be required only to transport a missile to a suitable launch position, and a pilot need not locate the target before launching the missiles. ATR implementation requires three areas of development: sensors, signal processing algorithms, and processing architectures. The number and type of sensors required to fulfill an ATR requirement are dictated by the mission to be performed. The processing architectures which will implement the signal processing algorithms will consist of numeric, parallel, and symbolic processing elements.

Date Published: 20 September 1987
PDF: 4 pages
Proc. SPIE 0750, Infrared Systems and Components, (20 September 1987); doi: 10.1117/12.939885

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 0750:
Infrared Systems and Components
Robert L. Caswell, Editor(s)