Detection of manmade objects

Hyperspectral imagers have the unique capability of doing both material identification and anomaly detection. However, hyperspectral imagers with hundreds of co-registered contiguous bands are difficult to field particularly if real-time processing is required. With judicious choice of bands, the anomaly detection performance of a multispectral sensor can rival that of hyperspectral sensors. In order to achieve this performance, the choice of multispectral bands relies on the presence of exploitable target or background spectral features. The universality of these features will determine the overall utility of a multispectral system. We have discovered that water vapor features in the SWIR (Short Wave InfraRed) can be used to distinguish manmade objects from natural backgrounds. As an example, we will show that two broad bands chosen to exploit these features make most manmade objects detectable in the presence of natural clutter with few false alarms.