Proceedings of the 9th InternationalConferenceon

Neural Information Processing (ICONIPOZ), Vol. 4

Lip0 Wan& JagaIh C Rajapakse, Klmihiko Fukushima,
SmYoung Lee,and Xin Yao (Editors)

MILITARY TARGET IDENTIFICATION USING SIMULATED ANNEALING

G A Vijayalakshmi Pai*
S Sreeram**

* Lecturer (Senior Grade) in Computer Applications

**Graduate Student
Dept of Computer Applications
PSG College of Technology
Coimbatore 641 004. India

ABSTRACT Simulated Annealiig technique could be employed to

The application of Simulated Annealing for the
identificationof Military Targets, images of which can be
both noisy and noise free, nominal and transformed has
been investigated in this paper. The images of Military
Targets of an enemy are captured by an unmanned
reconnaissance spy plane and then are interpreted by an
expert. In the absence of an expert, Simulated Annealing
can be used to identify the enemy targets.
The potential of Simulated Annealiig behaving as a
Pattern Recognizer to recognize images even when they
appear transformed, viz., rotated, translated and scaled,
besides noisy, has been studied Performance of Simulated
Annealing during different temperatures has also been
stndied on experimental cases.
identify the Military Target Images of the enemy.
The images are enhanced using Thresholding
technique and the enhanced images are given to a Moment
Invariant based Feature Extractor to extract the features of
the images. Simulated Annealing is made use of in
processing these feature vectors to identify the input
images against a training set. Already SA has been
attempted for application in Object recognition[8].
In this paper, the Simulated Annealing technique
has been presented in Sec. 2. A brief sketch on Military
Targets has been reviewed in Sec. 3. Identification of
Military Target images using SA has been discussed in
Sec. 4. Results of the Performance analysis of SA has
been presented in Sec. 5.
2. SIMULATED ANNEALING -AN OVERVIEW

Annealing is a process that involves heating a metal to

1. INTRODUCTION
A Neural Network is a massively parallel distributed
processor made up of simple processing units,which has a
natural propensity for storing experiential knowledge and
making it available for use.
Simulated Annealing (SA) technique [2,4]
borrowed from statistical mechanics, has turned out to be
an excellent optimizing technique which avoids local
minimumand seeks global minimum.
Military is one of the many areas where crucial
decisions need to be made. The images of Military
Targets of an enemy are captured using an unmanned
reconnaissance spy plane and then are interpreted by an
expert. n e decision making process is slow because the
expert is not in the plane. In the absence of an expert,
incredibly high temperature and slowly cooiig it down so
that the atoms settle to a particular pattern rendering it
swng so that it cannot be broken. Similarly we anneal the
Neural Network to a very high temperature and slowly
cool the network so that the input patterm settle to a
particular pattern. Simulated Annealing technique is used
to avoid local minima during m i n i i t i o n of an error
function and it tries to settle to a global minimum.
Algorithm
The following assumptions are made:
(i) A library of images is ready with their
category.
(ii) Overlapping images are separated.

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Library of Moment invariants of the irnages
which is the training set.
Moment invariants of the target image that is to
be identified.
Algorithm Steps
1. Set T to the current temperature, r to the
annealing rate, I to the number of iterations
2. Select those set of invariants of images from
library (Z) whose Euclidean distance from the
input invariant is less than a threshold say 7'H.
Let the accepted set be PR.
well known fact that civilians often suffer as casualties,
due to stray bombings that occur due to improper
identification. For example the bombing of the
headquarters of the Serbian State radio and television
stations resulted in huge civilian casualties.
These incidents can be avoided on ethical
grounds if accurate identification of military targets are
made possible. Also, to avoid continuous threat from the
enemy and to have an upper hand in the military warfare,
proper identification of military targets is a must. So to
cater to these needs the system aims to design a
mechanism that facilitates proper identification of
military targets. Sample Military Targets taken for
training are showninFigs 3.1-3.8.

3. Repeat Steps 3 to 5 until the error functions

E(+,*,.1)>E(,*,*!)
3 E(,.*, > E(!) do mx differ by

more than 1%.

4. F o r M = l t o I d o
4.1 PerhubPR.
4.2 Evaluate DEm the difference in
distances
4.3 If DE" < 0 then accept the
peaurbedPR and updatethe
Fig 3.1 Plane Fig 3.2~Helicopter
configuration
else
accept petturbed PR with
probability =exp(-DE,,, / T )
and update theconfiguration.

End of For loop

5. T = r * T

End of Simulated Annealing. Fig 3.3 Airport Fig 3.4 Bridge

3. MILITARY TARGET IDENTIFICATION

m t a r y targets U s d y involve communication

infrastructure, logistics, military power and other
-
financial i n f m s t r u c ~ s .During the two World Wars and
the recent NATO air strikes over foimer Yugoslavia,
some of the targets attacked were aiqorts, harbours,
~

planes, ships, helicopters, dams, ind bridges. The reason

for these targets being selected for military attack is to
Fig 3.5 Dam Fig 3.6 Harbou
cripple the enemy so as to minimize their counter attack
and to prevent the advances made by the enemy.
Though the laws of war include prohibition on
direct attack against civilians or civilian targets, it is a

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 6. CONCLUSION

In this paper, the identification of Military targets using

Simulated Annealing technique is discussed
The limitation of Simulated Annealing is that the
training set should be available during inference. Simulated
Annealing is iterative in nature and therefore is a little slow
as well. However Simulated Annealing could be
implemented as a learning algorithm over a Feed forward
Fig 3.7 Ship Fig 3.8 Tank network to avoid the storage of the entire training set.
Efforts are under progress to achieve the same.
4. SIMULATED ANNEALING FOR MILITARY
TARGET IDENTIFICATION Table 1: Moment Invariants of some military
targets
The Simulated Annealing Network is presented a training
set of images as illustrated in Figs 3.1-3.8. The images in
the training set are preprocessed and the Moment Invariant
based Feature extraction is done for the images. Several
Moment Invariant functions have been proposed[l,3,5].
However in this work, the Moment invariant functions
proposed by Rajasekaran and Pai [6,7] has been employed
Table 1 shows the Moment Invariants computed for a few
of the illustrated images.
During inference, the image from the scene is
prepmessed and the Moment Invariant based feature
vectom are extracted before presenting it to the Simulated
Annealing network for inference.

5. PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS

This section illustrates the results of the performance

analysisof SA.
Fig. 5.1 shows the performance of the system
when the images tracked are noisy. Fig. 5.2 shows the
performance of the Simulated Annealing technique under
different initial temperatures. Fig 5.3 illustrates the
performance of the system when images tracked are
rotated, scaled and translated. Here, ‘degree’ refers to the
rotation angle, ‘percentage’ to the scaling percentage and
‘pixel’ to the number of pixels the image was translated
The performance was tracked for rotation and translation
on an increasing scale and scaling on a decreasing scale.
Observe that the performance is a uniform 100%.
Fig. 5.4 illustrates the performance of the system
when images tracked appear rotated or translated. As 01 , , , . . , , , , ,
before, ‘pixel’ refers to the number of pixels the images IQ a, a 4 YI m m sa 9~ im
were translated and ‘angle’ to the rotation angle. Again,
both translations and rotations were carried out on an
increasing scale. Similarly, Fig. 5.5 shows the
performance of the system when the images tracked are
scaled and translated and Fig 5.6 the same when the Fig 5.1 PerformanceBased on Noise
images tracked are rotated and scaled.

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 MFERENCEBASW ON S C * U n G b N D T M U ~ O N

Fig 5.2 P e r f o m c e Based on Initial Fig 5.5 Performance Based on Scaling

Temperature and Translation

Fig 5.3 Performance Based on Rotation

Fig 5.6 Performance Based on Rotation
Scaling and Translation
and Scaling

Fig 5.4 Performance Based on Rotation

and Translation

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