Configurable computing solutions for automatic target recognition

Abstract

FPGAs can be used to build systems for automatic target recognition (ATR) that achieve an order of magnitude increase in performance over systems built using general purpose processors. This improvement is possible because the bit-level operations that comprise much of the ATR computational burden map extremely efficiently into FPGAs, and because the specificity of ATR target templates can be leveraged via fast reconfiguration. We describe here algorithms, design tools, and implementation strategies that are being used in a configurable computing system for ATR.