AUTOMATIC TARGET RECOGNITION FOR NAVAL TRAFFIC CONTROL USING NEURAL NETWORKS

Safety requirements in traffic control stress the importance of techni ques devoted to automatic tracking of little crafts in harbor areas. C hangeable sceneries and noise variability make hard the recognitions t ask of an automatic target recognition system. In this paper, a modula r system based on neural networks for the quasi real time detection of moving targets in seaport radar images is proposed. The neural module s resolve both noise removal and target identification tasks by proces sing steps including a segmentation, a filtering and a classification phase. The system performances have been evaluated on temporal sequenc es acquired in a real maritime environment. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.