Target Recognition in Synthetic Aperture Radar Images via Matching of Attributed Scattering Centers

This paper presents an approach for attributed scattering center (ASC) matching with application to synthetic aperture radar (SAR) automatic target recognition (ATR). A statistics-based distance measure is designed to evaluate the distance between individual ASCs. Afterwards, the Hungarian algorithm is employed to build a one-to-one correspondence between two ASC sets. Based on the correspondence, a global similarity and a local similarity are designed to comprehensively evaluate the global consistency and structural correlation between those two ASC sets. The two similarities comprehensively exploit the inner correlation between the two ASC sets, thus providing a reliable and robust similarity measure for SAR ATR. The two similarities are then fused based on the Dempster–Shafer evidence theory to determine the target type by the maximum belief rule. Extensive experiments conducted on the moving and stationary target acquisition and recognition dataset and the comparison with several state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the validity and robustness of the proposed method.