• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.97-105
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• 2020

A thermal imaging sensor receives the radiating energy from the target and the background, so it has been widely used for detection, tracking, and classification of targets at night for military purpose. In recognizing the target automatically using thermal images, if the correct edges of object are used then it can generate the classification results with high accuracy. However since the thermal images have lower spatial resolution and more blurred edges than color images, the accuracy of the classification using thermal images can be decreased. In this paper, to overcome this problem, a new hierarchical classifier using both shape and local features based on the segmentation reliabilities, and the class/pose updating method for vehicle classification are proposed. The proposed classification method was validated using thermal video sequences of more than 20,000 images which include four types of military vehicles - main battle tank, armored personnel carrier, military truck, and estate car. The experiment results showed that the proposed method outperformed the state-of-the-arts methods in classification accuracy.