Ben George Fitzpatrick

7860344, Dec 28, 2010

May 6, 2005

11/123549

Ben G. Fitzpatrick - Marina del Rey CA, US
Yun Wang - Marina del Rey CA, US

Stochastech Corporation - Los Angeles CA

G06K 9/36

382291, 382228, 382103, 345419, 3482221

Improved apparatus and methodology for image processing and object tracking that, inter alia, reduces noise. In one embodiment, the methodology is applied to moving targets such as missiles in flight, and comprises processing sequences of images that have been corrupted by one or more noise sources (e. g. , sensor noise, medium noise, and/or target reflection noise). In this embodiment, a multi-dimensional image is acquired for a first time step t; the acquired image is normalized and sampled, and then segmented into target and background pixel sets. Intensity statistics of the pixel sets are determined, and a prior probability image from a previous time step smoothed. The smoothed prior image is then shifted to produce an updated prior image, and a posterior probability image calculated using the updated prior probability. Finally, the position of the target is extracted using the posterior probability image. A tracking system and controller utilizing this methodology are also disclosed.

7813581, Oct 12, 2010

May 6, 2005

11/123445

Ben G. Fitzpatrick - Marina del Rey CA, US
Allen Robert Tannenbaum - Smyrna GA, US

G06K 9/40
G06K 9/00
G06K 9/68
H04N 5/225

382260, 382103, 382254, 382263, 382278, 348169

Improved methodology for image processing and object tracking that, inter alia, reduces noise. In one embodiment, the methodology is applied to moving targets, and comprises processing sequences of images that have been corrupted by one or more noise sources (e. g. , sensor noise, medium noise, and/or target reflection noise). A likelihood or similar logical construct (e. g. , Bayes' rule) is applied to the individual images (or aggregations thereof) of an image sequence in order to generate a posterior image for each observed image. The posterior images are fed-forward to the determination of the posterior image for one or more subsequent images (after smoothing), thereby making these subsequent determinations more accurate. The net result is a more accurate and noise-reduced representation (and location) of the target in each image.