In october 2003 we started a 3-year collaboration with Thales-Optronics SA (TOSA). Moreover, Aude Jacquot was granted with an industrial PhD felloship from ANRT.

TOSA devolops semi-automatic and automatic tools for air-to-ground missile guidance systems. Combat aircrafts are equiped with pan-tilt-yaw infrared cameras coupled with a laser beam, and the pilot has the tasks first, to designate a target onto this image and second, to keep this target within the field of view of the camera. The difficulties are associated with both finding a small target in a low-resolution image and in keeping track of this target in the presence of large aircraft motions (rotations, forward translation, etc.). When the aircraft flies at 300 meters/second, the target first appears as a blob and after only a few tenth of a second it changes its appearance to become a complex 3-D structure.

The scientific and technological objectives are the following: to develop tools enabling (i) off-line modelling of complex 3-D man-made objects from a collection of images (geometric modelling as well as the aspect of the objects, such as color and texture), (ii) automatic identification of the target, and automatic tracking of the target such that large changes are taken into account.