SAR Target Recognition Using Improved Monogenic-Based Feature Extraction Framework

Applying computer vision methods to synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image recognition is a research trend in recent years, and a series of valuable results have been achieved. In order to use machine learning classifiers for recognition, it is necessary to extract effective features, and most of these features are directly extracted based on grayscale SAR images. SAR data is usually rare, and more difficult to collect than optical images. Therefore, the problem of recognition using a small-size training set for SAR is more challenging to practical pattern recognition methods. The monogenic signal is an extended version of analytic signals in high-dimensional space which has attracted attention. In this paper, a new recognition framework which is based on feature dimensionality augmentation using combined multi-scale monogenic components and histogram of oriented gradient (HOG) feature is proposed. Proposed feature is named as MONO-HOG. This letter focuses on recognition under both standard operating condition (SOC) and small-sample scene. Experiments on moving and stationary target automatic recognition (MSTAR) data set show that our proposed framework has satisfying performance.