Fusion of low bit-depth images for battle damage indication

This paper addresses the problem of extracting information from an infrared weapon seeker in the terminal phase of a guided weapon engagement. The challenge is to obtain enough information (in the form of images) immediately prior to impact to allow the impact point to be verified. The introduction of a radio data link onto a weapon allows information to be transmitted back to a remote operator, but this data link will have a limited data rate due to finite bandwidth and other operational restrictions. The main problems are that the impact will destroy the seeker and this is very likely to disrupt the transmission of the data back to the operator. Any latency, introduced by pre-processing, compression or encryption of the images, will have a significant effect on the information that can be extracted. This paper shows that low bit-depth images can be fused to reconstruct an image of the weapon's impact point and that noise in the low-bit images increases the information content of the reconstructed images - an example of suprathreshold stochastic resonance.