<title>Analysis of infrared multispectral target/background field measurements</title>

Abstract

Thermal infrared multi-spectral field measurements of test panels, military vehicles, and backgrounds were extensively analyzed to assess the potential of multi-spectral processing for detecting low-contrast ground targets in vegetation clutter. The measurements clearly show the existence of exploitable color due to fine-scale variations in target-background spectral contrast, and they establish environment limits on coherent multi-band clutter suppression based on background spectral correlation. Typical variations in key multi-spectral performance parameters, and their implications for waveband selection, sensor design, and robust target detection performance, are presented and discussed.