Warhead fragments motion trajectories tracking and spatio-temporal distribution reconstruction method based on high-speed stereo photography

High speed photography technique is potentially the most effective way to measure the motion parameter of warhead fragment benefiting from its advantages of high accuracy, high resolution and high efficiency. However, it faces challenge in dense objects tracking and 3D trajectories reconstruction due to the characteristics of small size and dense distribution of fragment swarm. To address these challenges, this work presents a warhead fragments motion trajectories tracking and spatio-temporal distribution reconstruction method based on high-speed stereo photography. Firstly, background difference algorithm is utilized to extract the center and area of each fragment in the image sequence. Subsequently, a multi-object tracking (MOT) algorithm using Kalman filtering and Hungarian optimal assignment is developed to realize real-time and robust trajectories tracking of fragment swarm. To reconstruct 3D motion trajectories, a global stereo trajectories matching strategy is presented, which takes advantages of epipolar constraint and continuity constraint to correctly retrieve stereo correspondence followed by 3D trajectories refinement using polynomial fitting. Finally, the simulation and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can accurately track the motion trajectories and reconstruct the spatio-temporal distribution of 1.0×10³ fragments in a field of view (FOV) of 3.2 m×2.5 m, and the accuracy of the velocity estimation can achieve 98.6%.