Supervised self-organizing classification of super-resolution ISAR images: an anechoic chamber experiment

problem of the automatic classification of superresolution ISAR images is addressed in the paper. We describe an ane-choic 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 symme-try 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. Copyright © 2006 Emanuel Radoi et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 1