Coherent Point Drift based scattering center matching method with application to SAR ATR

Recognizing targets in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is an important, yet challenging problem in SAR image interpretation. Scattering center provides a concise and physically relevant description of the target's electromagnetic scattering phenomenon which makes it an ideal candidate for ATR. In this paper, scattering centers from template and measured data are used for ATR. The two scatter sets are matched by coherent point drift (CPD) method. Based on the match result, a match score is designed for the recognition purpose. In the recognition stage, a target is recognized as the template type with the highest match score. Experimental results based on the moving and stationary target acquisition and recognition database verified the effectiveness of the proposed method.