Synthetic aperture radar image correlation by use of preprocessing for enhancement of scattering centers

We demonstrate that a significant improvement can be obtained in the recognition of complicated synthetic aperture radar images taken from the Moving and Stationary Target Acquisitions and Recognition database. These images typically have a low number of scattering centers and high noise. We first preprocess the images and the templates formed from them so that their scattering centers are enhanced. Our technique can produce high-quality performance in several correlation criteria. For realistic automatic target recognition systems, our approach should make it easy to implement optical recognition systems with binarized data for many different types of correlation filter and should have a great effect on feeding data-compressed (binarized) information into either digital or optical processors.