Automatic battle damage assessment based on laser radar imagery

In this paper, we describe the automatic damage assessment process we developed to assess the extent of battle damage based on laser rdar (Ladar) images taken before and after a strike. The process is composed of three modules, the image registration module, the damage isolation module, and the damage assessment module. In the image registration module, distortion in the raw range data was first compensated to obtain the actual heights of the objects. Then, Ladar images taken before and after the strike were aligned according to their pixel intensities. In the damage isolation module, changes between the two sets of images were compared to isolate the locations of the actual damage. Factors such as sensor noise, sensor perspective difference, debris, and movement of vehicles, which all contribute to changes in the images, were automatically discounted in this module. The approximate location of the damage, if it existed, was passed to the damage assessment module to determine the extent of the damage using the region growing technique. This process enables fast and accurate evaluation of a strike with as little human supervision as possible.