Performance Analysis of Automatic Target Recognition Using Simulated SAR Image

As Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image can be acquired regardless of the weather and day or night, it is highly recommended to be used for Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) in the fields of surveillance, reconnaissance, and national security. However, there are some limitations in terms of cost and operation to build various and vast amounts of target images for the SAR-ATR system. Recently, interest in the development of an ATR system based on simulated SAR images using a target model is increasing. Attributed Scattering Center (ASC) matching and template matching mainly used in SAR-ATR are applied to target classification. The method based on ASC matching was developed by World View Vector (WVV) feature reconstruction and Weighted Bipartite Graph Matching (WBGM). The template matching was carried out by calculating the correlation coefficient between two simulated images reconstructed with adjacent points to each other. For the performance analysis of the two proposed methods, the Synthetic and Measured Paired Labeled Experiment (SAMPLE) dataset was used, which has been recently published by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). We conducted experiments under standard operating conditions, partial target occlusion, and random occlusion. The performance of the ASC matching is generally superior to that of the template matching. Under the standard operating condition, the average recognition rate of the ASC matching is 85.1%, and the rate of the template matching is 74.4%. Also, the ASC matching has less performance variation across 10 targets. The ASC matching performed about 10% higher than the template matching according to the amount of target partial occlusion, and even with 60% random occlusion, the recognition rate was 73.4%.