Forward-looking recognition based on convex hull invariants of oil depot region

Forward-looking navigation system is a fire-new technique for terminal guidance of intending precision-guided weapons and research on oil depot recognition of forward-looking imaging is an essential task for this control and guide system. As conventional matching methods could not overcome perspective transmutation, a new method to identify the forward-looking area of oil depot was advanced in this paper. First, constructed three statistics of regions based on convex hull, which were invariant to affine transform. Then, number of inside oilcans could easily be achieved by adding a decision step. Finally the area of oil depot could be located according to the comparison between the computed number and the foreknowable number under a given threshold. Experiments applied to optical images in different areas show that the proposed method is accurate and has wider application in identifying such small objects as oilcans, and it realizes automatically recognizing area of oil depot from forward-looking imaging.