Optimal decision fusion using sparse representation-based classifiers on monogenic-signal dictionaries for SAR ATR

Abstract

Sparse representation-based classification (SRC) possesses remarkable characteristics for application in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) automatic target recognition (ATR), for instance, inherent feature extraction and robustness to articulation, and so on. However, the performance of SRC is highly sensitive to parameters such as sufficient training samples, SAR images quality, and targets' changing conditions in depression, pose, configuration, and so on. Unfortunately, the training sample resources for SAR ATR are often expensive and scarce. Further, the targets in SAR images, even with slightest changes in conditions, display mutable characteristics attributable to unique SAR image formation, and speckle noise corruption. To overcome these obstacles, this Letter proposes to establish several compact and complementary dictionaries using monogenic signal's components of SAR images and Fisher discriminative dictionary learning. Then, an optimal decision fusion (ODF) strategy is proposed, which utilises SRC and the latter dictionaries for robust SAR ATR. Compared with single classifiers or multiple parallel classifiers, the proposed ODF increases the accuracy of recognition, while at the same time, decreases the complexity of the system. The proposed methods have considerable features making them applicable in practical situations. Based on the experimental results, the proposed methods outperform state-of-the-art approaches.