Using self-organising maps to classify radar range profiles

A model based approach to radar range profile classification is presented, and it is shown to be equivalent to training a topographic mapping neural network (T. Kohonen, 1984) on each of the range profile categories to be classified. The topographic mapping method is basically a Euclidean distance method of classifying range profiles. However, because it is model based, it offers much more flexibility, and will perform better in situations where there is little training data.