Supervised Self-Organizing Classification of Superresolution ISAR Images: An Anechoic Chamber Experiment

The problem of the automatic classification of superresolution ISAR images is addressed in the paper. We describe an anechoic chamber experiment involving ten-scale-reduced aircraft models. The radar images of these targets are reconstructed using MUSIC-2D (multiple signal classification) method coupled with two additional processing steps: phase unwrapping and symmetry enhancement. A feature vector is then proposed including Fourier descriptors and moment invariants, which are calculated from the target shape and the scattering center distribution extracted from each reconstructed image. The classification is finally performed by a new self-organizing neural network called SART (supervised ART), which is compared to two standard classifiers, MLP (multilayer perceptron) and fuzzy KNN (K nearest neighbors). While the classification accuracy is similar, SART is shown to outperform the two other classifiers in terms of training speed and classification speed, especially for large databases. It is also easier to use since it does not require any input parameter related to its structure.