Automatic Target Recognition Strategy for Synthetic Aperture Radar Images Based on Combined Discrimination Trees

A strategy is introduced for achieving high accuracy in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) automatic target recognition (ATR) tasks. Initially, a novel pose rectification process and an image normalization process are sequentially introduced to produce images with less variations prior to the feature processing stage. Then, feature sets that have a wealth of texture and edge information are extracted with the utilization of wavelet coefficients, where more effective and compact feature sets are acquired by reducing the redundancy and dimensionality of the extracted feature set. Finally, a group of discrimination trees are learned and combined into a final classifier in the framework of Real-AdaBoost. The proposed method is evaluated with the public release database for moving and stationary target acquisition and recognition (MSTAR). Several comparative studies are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Experimental results show the distinctive superiority of the proposed method under both standard operating conditions (SOCs) and extended operating conditions (EOCs). Moreover, our additional tests suggest that good recognition accuracy can be achieved even with limited number of training images as long as these are captured with appropriately incremental sample step in target poses.