Active vehicle protection using angle and time-to-go information from high-resolution infrared sensors

An algorithm for an active protection system with two or more passive infrared sensors based on the principle of triangulation and an extended measurement vector consisting of time-to-go (TTG) estimation is proposed to address high-speed short-range threats. The proposed algorithm exploits the full potential of passive sensors enabling the use of target irradiance in a manner to estimate the TTG along with angle information. The approach here uses target irradiance measured at successive scans to initialize a fixed interval iteration scheme for estimating the TTG. The Newton’s method is used for estimating the TTG, the estimate is then added to the measurement vector and position estimation is performed using an extended Kalman filter. Computer simulations demonstrate the resulting improvement in estimation and feasibility for real-time application of the proposed algorithm.