Military ships commonly use infrared decoys for defending themselves against infrared anti-ship missile systems. For anti-ship missiles, having a fast and robust infrared counter – counter measure (IRCCM) algorithm is crucial for overall system performance. In this paper, a straight-forward yet effective IRCCM method for sea skimming missile systems is introduced. First, the common tactics for disposing decoy are analyzed. The analysis shows that the vertical component of optical flow may contain critical information on whether there is a decoy in the scene. This idea is supported by another intensity based criterion. However optical flow calculations create a significant computational load, and to speed up the algorithm and decrease the false alarm rate, the waterline is detected by using Hough transform and the optical flow calculations are only applied to the region that is above the waterline with a margin. Since the infrared signature of both military ships and decoys are classified, some scenarios are created by using infrared scene generator. A scene generator can model the objects by considering its material information, the atmospheric conditions, detector type and the territory. The performance of overall methodology is tested with this infrared test data.
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