Upper bound calculations of ATR performance for ladar sensors

The use of robust and representative synthetic imagery data to test and evaluate automatic target recognition (ATR) systems has long been desired but generally considered beyond the current state of the art. The use of synthetic data is investigated here to calculate upper bounds on potential ATR system performance. This paper presents the use of synthetically generated imagery templates as a means of developing upper bounds of ATR performance for laser radar based seekers. This approach employs a synthetic scene generation capability and integrates it with error models that represent decrements in performance do to resolution, noise and geometric distortion resulting from the sensing process. This paper describes the modeling approach taken and presents preliminary results. The model is currently undergoing testing against real imagery and is being used to select test sets to more effectively evaluate ATR's.