Accuracy and computational comparisons of TLS - Prony , Burg , and FFT - basedscattering center extraction

Scattering centers extracted from radar returns are features that can be used for automatic target recognition (ATR). Many diierent algorithms exist which can extract scattering centers from a radar return. They all, however, fall into one of two large classes: model and FFT-based techniques. In this paper, we consider one FFT and two model based techniques: 1) FFT with peak extraction, 2) the Burg autoregressive method, and 3) the TLS-Prony method. We present experiments that compare the algorithms for three test scenarios. We show how the model-based techniques are more accurate than the FFT-based technique for simple test cases but that theFFT-based technique to out-perform the model-based techniques in terms of computation.