Abstract
The Arena Fragmentation Test(AFT) is one of the important tasks for designing a high-explosive warhead. In order to measure the statistics of a warhead in the test, fragments of a warhead that penetrate steel plates are detected by using complex and expensive measuring equipment. In this paper, instead of using specific hardware to measure the statistics of a warhead, we propose to use an image processing based object detection algorithm to detect fragments in AFT. To this end, we use a hard-thresholding method with a brightness feature and apply a morphology filter to remove noise components. We also propose a simple yet effective temporal filtering method to detect only the first penetrating fragments. We show that the performance of the proposed method is comparable to that of a hardware system under the same experimental conditions. Furthermore, the proposed method can produce better results in terms of finding exact positions of fragments.