Focusing on targets through exclusion

Automatic target recognition (ATR) schemes attempt to locate and classify given target objects. Successful approaches either require substantial computing power to correlate target models with all pixels or use a search strategy to minimize the amount of pixels considered as candidates. The search refinement approach to ATR can be accomplished by continually examining various resolutions of the data sets for candidate objects or through a technique of excluding areas that could not contain the object. This paper describes an approach for excluding areas which are identified a priori as 'clutter' and should not contain the areas of interest.