Computer-aided camouflage assessment in real-time

Current army operations demand for continuous improvements of camouflage and concealment. This requires systematic, objective assessment methods which is a very time consuming task using the present software systems. Also the interactive composition of ground-truth is cumbersome. We present a system for camouflage assessment using image sequences in real-time. The image sequences may stem from any imaging sensor, e.g. visual-optical (VIS), infrared (IR), and SAR. Flexible navigation in image sequences, a semi-automatic generation of groundtruth along with several functional enhancements form the base of the system whereas the main issue is the camouflage assessment function with its generic interface to include individually defined feature extractors. For semi-automatic annotation and ground-truth construction the user has to define interesting areas with polygons in some starting frame. After that, the system estimates the transformation parameters for successive images in real-time and applies the parameters on the previously defined polygons in order to warp the ground-truth polygons onto the new frames. Various classes of polygons (target 1 : : : n, background area 1 : : :m, etc.) can be defined and colorized. Defined ground-truth areas can be evaluated in real-time by applying individually selected feature extractors whilst the results are displayed graphically and as a chart. For the evaluation, new measurements can be integrated by the user and applied via a generic interface. The system is built as a generic integration platform offering plenty of extension potential in order to further enable or improve camouflage assessment methods. Due to generic interfaces also ATR and ATD methods for automatic and semi-automatic camouflage assessment are integrable.