Field artillery weapons are normally employed in masked or defilade positions to conceal them from the enemy. Placing the firing platoon in defilade precludes direct fire on most targets. Consequently, indirect fire must be used when FA weapons fire on targets that are not visible from the weapons. Thus, the gunnery problem is an indirect fire problem. Solving the problem requires weapon and ammunition settings that, when applied to the weapon and ammunition, will cause the projectile to achieve the desired effects on the target. To achieve accurate firstround fire for effect (FFE) on a target, an artillery unit must compensate for nonstandard conditions as completely as time and the tactical situation permit. If the conditions for accurate predicted fire cannot be met completely, the firing unit maybe required using adjust-fire missions to engage targets. Adjust-fire missions can result in less effect on the target, increased ammunition expenditure, and greater possibility that hostile target acquisition assets will detect the firing unit. The results of each adjust-fire mission maybe collected by the friendly observers and/or friendly target acquisition assets (such as uav’s) used as the "eyes and ears" of all indirect fire systems. The aforementioned firing results are affected by the nonstandard conditions such as meteorological procedures and area’s geomorphology. In this paper we introduce an image processing method that uses thermal images taken after an adjustive-fire mission in order to assist the correction procedure. For this purpose, we propose the use of a term we called “firecentroid” computed by a special image segmentation process.
Keywords: image processing; firing; thermal image processing; first fire for effect
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