Discriminative dictionaries for automated target recognition

We present an approach for discriminating among dierent classes of imagery in a scene. Our intended application is the detection of small watercraft in a littoral environment where both targets and land- and sea-based clutter are present. The approach works by training dierent overcomplete dictionaries to model the dierent image classes. The likelihood ratio obtained by applying each model to the unknown image is then used as the discriminating test statistic. We rst demonstrate the approach on an illustrative test problem and then apply the algorithm to short-wave infrared imagery with known targets.