An overview of the fundamentals of ground target recognition using SAR has been given. There is a tendency, when discussing ground target ATR, to consider only the most complex problems consisting of very many target classes and challenging clutter environments. However, it should be borne in mind that radar ATR is not a single problem that can or cannot be solved but that it is a continuum of problems of varying degrees of difficulty and complexity all of which provide useful military capability. This was essentially the viewpoint articulated by the NATO SET111 Task Group on ground target recognition at the conclusion of that activity. Operational radar ATR systems already exist and the overarching challenge is to push forward the solution space to achieve successful operation in more difficult and complex circumstances. To achieve this, a number of key specific challenges must be overcome, some of which are identified and discussed in Chapter 10, and to a large extent it is these challenges that current researchers are tackling. Hopefully this book will inspire those reading to contribute to the effort to solve these challenges.

Chapter Contents:

• 2.1 Introduction
• 2.2 SAR phenomenology
• 2.3 The ATR processing chain
• 2.3.1 Pre-screening
• 2.3.2 Template-matching
• 2.3.3 Feature-based classification
• 2.4 Use of contextual information in target detection
• 2.4.1 Motivation
• 2.4.2 Statistical formulation
• 2.4.3 Simulated results
• 2.5 Databases and modelling
• 2.5.1 Database construction
• 2.5.2 Case study: model-based ATR using MOCEM
• 2.6 Performance assessment
• 2.6.1 Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves
• 2.6.2 Confusion matrices
• 2.6.3 Operational assessment
• 2.7 Conclusions
• Acknowledgements
• References

Inspec keywords: synthetic aperture radar; object detection; clutter

Other keywords: automatic target recognition; ground target ATR; SAR; ground target recognition; NATO SET111 Task Group; operational radar ATR systems; clutter environments

Subjects: Optical, image and video signal processing; Radar equipment, systems and applications; Electromagnetic compatibility and interference