This paper describes an airborne deployment of the Viper sniper detection and counterfire system 1 and several improvements that were incorporated after a review of comments from users of the fielded systems 2. The Viper sensor was flown aboard a T-34 aircraft and the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) Sparrow unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Infrared (IR) and visible video sequences were recorded for post processing. Algorithms for motion compensation, frame registration and target detection were then developed to run on the collected image data. No inertial attitude data were recorded and all motion compensation functions were made using image data. These experiments indicate that automatic detection of muzzle flash from an airborne platform is possible, and techniques that were developed for background estimation and false alarm reduction with a stationary sensor can apply with modifications to a moving sensor. 1 Caulfield, J.T.; Gower, P.W.; Moroz, S.A., Burchick, D.A., Ertem, M.C., Pierson, R.B.; "Performance of the Vectored Infrared Personnel Engagement and Return Fire (VIPER) IRFPA Muzzle Flash Detection System"(U), Abstract Subject Terms

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Much work has been done on designing arrays for use with conventional beamforming techniques. However. high resolution array processing techniqUes such as the thaximum entropy (MEM) and maximum likelihood (MLM) methods impose different constraints on the array. MEM and MLM operate on measured samples of the correlation function and so are expected to perform better when the correlation function is measured at more and more evenly distributed lags. A uniform array gives redundant lags; the proposed array design technique places the sensors to maximize the number of the resulting lags and to distribute them uniformly. The resulting nonuniform arrays have the property that no nonzero lags are repeated. Simulations demonstrate improved resolution and spectral matching properties whep the optimized nonuniform arrays are used with MEM and MLM array processing.