Automatic Target Recognition on Synthetic Aperture Radar Imagery: A Survey

Automatic target recognition (ATR) for military applications is one of the core processes toward enhancing intelligence and autonomously operating military platforms. Spurred by this and given that Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) presents several advantages over its counterpart data domains, this article surveys and assesses current SAR ATR algorithms that employ the most popular dataset for the SAR domain, namely the moving and stationary target acquisition and recognition (MSTAR) dataset. Specifically, we perform a direct comparison between current SAR ATR methods and highlight the strengths and weaknesses of each technique under both standard and extended operational conditions. Additionally, despite MSTAR being the standard SAR ATR benchmarking dataset, we also highlight its weaknesses and suggest future research directions.