A Monte Carlo simulation based approach to a priori performance prediction for target detection and recognition in cluttered synthetic aperture radar imagery

Multi-sensor systems for wide area surveillance and tracking are an area of increasing interest for civil and military applications. In order to design these systems to reliably achieve a specification, performance models are required for each of the system components, to allow synthesis of the overall system performance. The work presented in this paper addresses the problem of a performance model for the target detection and recognition performance of a SAR sensor component in a surveillance system. A Monte Carlo simulation based approach is described which is used to predict the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) as a function of the target, the clutter background and the sensor specification for a template matching recognition algorithm. Some initial results from an experimental validation trial are presented and it is concluded that there is sufficient similarity between the current model's predictions of performance and the actual performance achieved with representative real data to encourage further development work.