Region Matching of SAR Images Using Blocks for Target Recognition

A synthetic aperture radar (SAR) target recognition method based on image blocking and matching is proposed. The test SAR image is first separated into four blocks, which are analyzed and matched separately. For each block, the monogenic signal is employed to describe its time-frequency distribution and local details with a feature vector. The sparse representation-based classification (SRC) is used to classify the four monogenic feature vectors and produce the reconstruction error vectors. Afterwards, a random weight matrix with a rich set of weight vectors is used to linearly fuse the feature vectors and all the results are analyzed in a statistical way. Finally, a decision value is designed based on the statistical analysis to determine the target label. The proposed method is tested on the moving and stationary target acquisition and recognition (MSTAR) dataset and the results confirm the validity of the proposed method.