OVERVIEW

Acquisition, tracking, and pointing (ATP) naturally decomposes into detection, recognition, and identification (DRI); all are critical functions in a number of scientific, military, and commercial security systems. The ATP function is often used to refer to the servo system, including the gimbals, stabilization, and slewing functions, whereas DRI often refers to the ability of the complete system to present information to a user (human or machine) tasked with performing an intelligent detection, recognition, or identification function. Several recent developments have vastly increased this capability, including multispectral and hyperspectral imagery, image fusion, image enhancement, and automatic target defection algorithms.

Generally, the tasks of acquisition, tracking, and pointing occur before the target is detected, or in the first phases of detection, and traditionally have been analog in nature, although modern systems perform this all digitally. The detection, recognition, and identification process occurs after the ATP and generally involves a human, machine vision system, or automatic target recognizer.

One can imagine early hunters going through the same activities as today's heat-seeking missiles when the concepts of ATP/DRI are applied. For instance, the hunter looks for a bird to kill for dinner and, like the fighter pilot, eventually finds prey. He then recognizes it as a bird, identifies it as to the type of bird, and verifies that it is a tasty species of bird.

Acquisition takes place as all other distractions are eliminated and attention is turned to this particular target. Next, the brain of the hunter and the computer...