A multi-stage neural network for automatic target detection

Automatic target recognition (ATR) involves processing two-dimensional images for detecting, classifying, and tracking targets. The first stage in ATR is the detection process. This involves discrimination between target and non-target objects in a scene. We discuss a novel approach which addresses the target detection process. This method extracts relevant object features utilizing principal component analysis. These extracted features are then presented to a multi-stage neural network which allows an overall increase in detection rate, while decreasing the false positive alarm rate. We discuss the techniques involved and present some detection results that have been implemented on the multi-stage neural network.