Detection of Multiple Targets in an Image

Detecting the locations of multiple targets in image frames remains a challenging problem in various applications including target tracking, robotics and autonomous systems. Most of the existing approaches developed to address this problem rely on threshold based detection and are ad-hoc natured; there are no systematic approaches to detect multiple targets in a single image. In this paper, such an approach is developed by assuming the point spread function (PSF) of target signal intensities in the image to be Gaussian and that the noise is independently and identically distributed (i.i.d.). It is shown that, after joint estimation of target position and PSF, the multiple target detection problem decomposes into parallel single target detection problems. The performance of the proposed approach is demonstrated in this paper through a simulated example.