Recognition of Targets in SAR Images Based on a WVV Feature Using a Subset of Scattering Centers

This paper proposes a robust method for feature-based matching with potential for application to synthetic aperture radar (SAR) automatic target recognition (ATR). The scarcity of measured SAR data available for training classification algorithms leads to the replacement of such data with synthetic data. As attributed scattering centers (ASCs) extracted from the SAR image reflect the electromagnetic phenomenon of the SAR target, this is effective for classifying targets when purely synthetic SAR images are used as the template. In the classification stage, following preparation of the extracted template ASC dataset, some of the template ASCs were subsampled by the amplitude and the neighbor matching algorithm to focus on the related points of the test ASCs. Then, the subset of ASCs were reconstructed to the world view vector feature set, considering the point similarity and structure similarity simultaneously. Finally, the matching scores between the two sets were calculated using weighted bipartite graph matching and then combined with several weights for overall similarity. Experiments on synthetic and measured paired labeled experiment datasets, which are publicly available, were conducted to verify the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method. The proposed method can be used in practical SAR ATR systems trained using simulated images.