FEATURE-BASED DETECTION AND CONTEXT DESCRIMINATE CLASSIFICATION FOR KNOWN IMAGE STRUCTURES

A method is provided for the detection and classification of targets in a digital image of a structure having known characteristics. In general, windowed portions of the image are evaluated in context with the entire image and in terms of their location in the image. More specifically, a scoring scheme is used to identify relevant windows with the relevance of each window being evaluated in terms of location in the image and the known characteristics of the structure being imaged. Relevant windows satisfying a threshold criteria are grouped based on their relative location in the image. A group scoring scheme is applied to each group to identify and classify targets.