Measurement Extraction for a Point Target from an Optical Sensor

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

12-1-2018

Publication Title

IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems

Volume

54

Issue

6

First Page

2735

Keywords

Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB), optical sensor, pixel size, signal-to-noise ratios (SNR), target detection, target location estimation

Last Page

2745

Abstract

This paper considers the measurement extraction for a point target from an optical sensor's focal plane array (FPA) with a dead zone separating neighboring pixels. Assuming that the energy density of the target deposited in the FPA conforms to a Gaussian point spread function and that the noise mean and variance in each pixel are proportional to the pixel area (i.e., according to a Poisson noise model), we derive the Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB) for the covariance of the estimated target location. It is observed that that there is an optimal pixel size that minimizes the CRLB for a given dead-zone width, and the maximum likelihood estimator is shown to be efficient via Monte Carlo runs for moderate-to-large signal-to-noise ratios. The test statistic for target detection is derived and it is shown to be a matched filter at the estimated location. The distributions of the test statistic under both hypotheses are derived using some approximations. The detection probability is then obtained.

DOI

10.1109/TAES.2018.2828259

ISSN

00189251

E-ISSN

15579603

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