Statistical Moments Based Methods For Detecting Sub-Pixel Target Tracks In Large Image Sequences

This paper reviews and compares the performance of several methods to detect target tracks in image sequences. The targets are assumed to be sub-pixel or not resolved by the imaging system, and moving over a static background. To process the resulting large amount of data requires simple, fast and robust processing methods to quickly find and display tracks of moving targets in a single image. An object moving through a pixel in a scene will momentarily perturb the pixel intensity signal, introducing a change of both skewness and kurtosis in the intensity histogram relative to an undisturbed pixel. Numerical experiments show that for Gaussian and Poisson distributed system noise higher order moments (>2) perform better than second order detectors.