Hughes Aircraft Company

Robert A Sturla

Jacob M Sacks

LeRoy F Ichida

A scene tracker for use with imaging or quasi-imaging sensors such as TV cameras, FLIRS, millimeter-wave scanners, or the like is disclosed. Specifically, the invention is concerned with a form of correlation tracking. At the start of a track mode, part or parts of a scene are stored in a memory. Every subsequent video scan is then compared with the scene or parts of the scene stored in memory to find the 'best match' between live data and stored data. This process generates signal output proportional to horizontal and/or vertical translations of the scene. Besides pure translation, the disclosed scene tracker is capable of tracking an original aim point in the presence of scene rotation, scene growth (zooming), scene reduction (dezooming), distortion, and/or partial scene obscuration. Special novel features of the invention include a multi-cell correlation principle; a novel method of computing and storing correlation functions for each cell; a method to derive weighted average displacements for the entities of all cell correlations; and a novel video signal processing technique.

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Northridge, CA, United States of America

Robert A Sturla