CART IV: Improving automatic camouflage assessment with assistance methods

In order to facilitate systematic, computer aided improvements of camouflage and concealment assessment methods, the software system CART (Camouflage Assessment in Real-Time) was built up for the camouflage assessment of objects in multispectral image sequences (see contributions to SPIE 2007, SPIE 2008 and SPIE 2009 [1], [2], [3]). It comprises a semi-automatic marking of target objects (ground truth generation) including their propagation over the image sequence and the evaluation via user-defined feature extractors. The conspicuity of camouflaged objects due to their movement can be assessed with a purpose-built processing method named MTI snail track algorithm. This paper presents the enhancements over the recent year and addresses procedures to assist the camouflage assessment of moving objects for image data material with strong noise or image artefacts. This extends the evaluation methods significantly to a broader application range. For example, some noisy infrared image data material can be evaluated for the first time by applying the presented methods which fathom the correlations between camouflage assessment, MTI (moving target indication) and dedicated noise filtering