Evolutionary low-cost visual shooting practice system

Abstract

Conventional shooting practice systems are expensive, life threatening, and lack proper statistical evaluation of trainee's performance. This paper presents the implementation and testing of a proposed evolutionary laser shooting practice system for early shooting practice stages. Presented system consists of a real gun replica equipped with lasers rather than live ammunition, a simple CCD camera, a shooting target, and a Compact Vision System (CVS) running National Instruments LabVIEW software. In order to detect con-centric rings of the shooting target an image processing algorithm is developed and employed by the CVS. In addition, the developed algorithm distinguishes locations of trainee's laser shots relative to the center point of the shooting target. For each training session, the system delivers a detailed overall performance report including scores of shooter accuracy and precision. The system was tested at a 100 m long shooting range under different camera-to-target angles and various lighting conditions. Results proved robust performance with accurate and detailed shooting reports under all tested conditions. Presented system overcomes conventional shooting practice systems in terms of cost, safety, evaluation accuracy and portability.