IRES: An expert system for automatic target recognition from short distance infrared images

This paper presents an expert system for target recognition from short distance infrared images. This expert system first identify the position and orientation of the target. The number of possible positions and orientations is extremely large, therefore, the solution space cannot be fully explored. A heuristic search algorithm is used instead to guide the expert system toward the solution in an efficient, manner. Bayesian estimation theory and fuzzy logics are used to derive the knowledge combination rides used by the heuristic search algorithm. These rules are generic enough to be applied to other type of expert systems and to data fusion problems. Once the position and the orientation of the target have been found, the expert system simply tries to match parts of the image of the target with templates under the same position and orientation in order to identify the target.