Machine Learning-based Approaches in Error Detection and Score Prediction for Small Arm Firing Systems in the Military Domain

Error pattern recognition is a routine job in the military to provide corrective guidelines to the shooter. Errors can be recognized with a visual approach based on the spreading pattern of bullets on the target board, which are categorized into four categories: long horizontal error, long vertical error, bi-focal error, and scattered error. Currently, this process is performed manually and requires active human involvement. Similarly, an automated system to predict the future performance of a shooter is not available in the military domain. Moreover, the performance of a shooter depends on several factors, including age, weather, ammunition type, availability of light, previous scores, shooting range, classification of firing, and other factors. The military domain has not addressed the automatic prediction of such performance. While error correction and performance analysis have been extensively explored in the field of sports, their application within the military domain remains an untapped area of research and investigation. Numerous recent endeavors have suggested the utilization of deep learning to tackle this challenge. However, the absence of real-time data poses a significant obstacle, rendering these solutions seemingly impractical. In this paper, we have applied machine- learning approaches and adopted the best algorithm to automate the error pattern recognition system within a military domain. Our proposed methodology has two modules. The first module uses various algorithms and finds a random forest classifier that can do better to recognize the pattern of error and in the second phase, we used the AdaBoost classifier to predict the score and performance of a firer. Several experiments have been conducted, and the results show an average accuracy of 0.968 using Random Forest to recognize the pattern of error and an accuracy of 0.69 using AdaBoost to predict score performance. The data has been collected from the real-time environment of the military domain and experiments have been carried out using real-time scenarios with the military in mind.