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 parameters. It is shown that for these applications such a single characteristic is sufficient. In order to achieve this five popular tracking algorithms are used. Synthetic IR image sequences are generated to simulate a large set of attack approaches and assemble sufficient statistics on the behavior of the algorithms. 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.