Real-time target recognition and tracking using local intensity histogram

To deal with the conflict between real-time target tracking and low-power hardware platform of television homing seeker, a binary feature descriptor using local intensity histogram is proposed, which is inspired by the off-line training method. Then, a two-stage feature matching scheme consisting of dissimilarity function and index value is adopted based on the proposed descriptor. The main advantage of this scheme is to convert time-consuming feature matching to simple bitwise operations. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves outstanding runtime performance at the speed of over 25 fps with only a little memory cost. With its robustness to scale changes, rotation and illumination changes, the method could well fulfill the real-time target recognition and tracking needs of homing seekers.