Multi-feature based automatic recognition of ship targets in ISAR images

This paper deals with the problem of Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) of Non Cooperative Targets. Specifically the focus is on the ATR of ships in ISAR images. To fulfill this task a multi-feature based technique is proposed which uses a number of features extracted from the ship radar image. Both cases of known/unknown target aspect angle and single/multi-frame based processing technique are considered in order to assess the performance improvement arising from the a priori knowledge of the aspect angle and from the joint use of the features extracted from a number of different frames. The performance of the proposed technique is investigated in depth by means of simulated data. Moreover results of its application to live ISAR images of ship targets are also provided showing the effectiveness of the proposed approach. © 2008 IEEE.