Design of cooperative matched filter for detection of chemical agents

A matched filter (MF) is one of the most widely used detectors for the detection of chemical agent (CA) clouds in the passive hyperspectral imaging system. To improve the detection performance of the MF, a linear cooperation scheme that allocates cooperation coefficients to the spectra of the neighbouring pixels is proposed. The optimal cooperation coefficients, which removes noise signatures whilst minimising the distortion of CA signatures, are acquired by finding the maximum likelihood estimator of the cooperation coefficients. It is proved that a moving average scheme that assigns the same coefficients is the optimal cooperation scheme. Finally, a cooperative MF with the optimal cooperation scheme is designed. It is demonstrated that the proposed cooperative MF is capable of robust detection performance via outdoor experiments with actual CA data measured by a Bruker HI‐90 instrument.