A single performance characteristic for the evaluation of seeker tracking algorithms

This paper presents a single numerical performance characteristic for the evaluation of seeker tracking algorithms. It concentrates on ship IR seeker tracking algorithms. Assessing the threat from guided missiles needs a sound evaluation of their performance. The main goal is to introduce a characteristic which is able to assess the threat for ships depending on various scenario pa-rameters. It is shown that for these applications such a single characteristic is sufficient. In order to achieve this seven popular tracking algorithms are used for this. Synthetic IR image sequences are generated to simulate a large set of attack approaches and assemble sufficient statistics on the behavior of the algo-rithms. The introduced characteristic can also be used for investigations on algorithms themselves, e.g. for sensitivity analyses and parameter optimization of a single algorithm, and for comparison of different algorithms.