Detecting and tracking moving objects in long-distance imaging through turbulent medium

The challenge of detecting and tracking moving objects in imaging throughout the atmosphere stems from the atmospheric turbulence effects that cause time-varying image shifts and blur. These phenomena significantly increase the miss and false detection rates in long-range horizontal imaging. An efficient method was developed, which is based on novel criteria for objects’ spatio-temporal properties, to discriminate true from false detections, following an adaptive thresholding procedure for foreground detection and an activity-based false alarm likeliness masking. The method is demonstrated on significantly distorted videos and compared with state of the art methods, and shows better false alarm and miss detection rates.