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Automatic Target Recognition of High Resolution SAR/ISAR Images
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Automatic Target Recognition of High Resolution SAR/ISAR Images

A special issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220). This special issue belongs to the section "Remote Sensors".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 August 2018) | Viewed by 68351

Special Issue Editors

Prof. Tat Soon Yeo

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore 117583, Singapore
Interests: SAR; ISAR; InSAR; BiISAR; MIMOSAR
Prof. Dr. Mengdao Xing

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
National Laboratory of Radar Signal Processing, Xidian University, Xi’an 710071, China
Interests: synthetic aperture radar (SAR); inverse SAR; sparse signal processing
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

SAR and ISAR are important microwave detection tools for remote sensing and reconnaissance. The underlying electromagnetic scattering mechanism and coherent imaging system produce unique target characteristics in the resulting images. While these characteristics are complicated to interpret and understand visually, they provide unique target information which are essential for classification and identification. A good Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) system should have the capability to locate the region of interest (ROI) containing the potential targets and recognize those target signatures with high accuracy and efficiency without any manual intervention.

This Special Issue is aimed to the submission of both review and original research articles related to, but not limited to SAR/ISAR ATR systems. Multi and hyperspectral approaches are also welcome. The Special Issue is also not limited to land-based and/or air-borne man-made targets. Sea-going targets, as well as natural resource (vegetation, etc.) identification and monitoring are also encouraged. 

Prof. Tat Soon Yeo
Prof. Mengdao Xing
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sensors is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • Automatic Target Recognition
  • Detection algorithm
  • Feature extraction
  • Neural network
  • Deep learning
  • Computer-aided classification
  • Machine learning
  • Artificial intelligent

Published Papers (17 papers)

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Research

16 pages, 6586 KiB  
Article
Ship Segmentation in SAR Images by Improved Nonlocal Active Contour Model
by Xiaoqiang Zhang, Boli Xiong, Ganggang Dong and Gangyao Kuang
Sensors 2018, 18(12), 4220; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18124220 - 01 Dec 2018
Cited by 14 | Viewed by 3260
Abstract
Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has been widely used in ocean surveillance. As an important part of shipping management and military applications, ship monitoring is a study hotspot in SAR image interpretation; hence, many researches focus on ship targets. Among these studies, ship segmentation [...] Read more.
Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has been widely used in ocean surveillance. As an important part of shipping management and military applications, ship monitoring is a study hotspot in SAR image interpretation; hence, many researches focus on ship targets. Among these studies, ship segmentation is a basic work, but still remains challenging due to the speckle noise and the complicated backscattering phenomenology in SAR images. To solve the problems, this paper proposes a new method for ship segmentation by nonlocal processing. Firstly, the proposed nonlocal energy describes the nonlocal comparison of patches and optimizes regions with spatially-varying features. Secondly, we rewrite the energy functional by introducing a ratio distance defined with respect to the probability density functions of regions to overcome the influence of the multiplicative noise. Finally, the integral histogram is introduced into the pairwise interactions to fasten the speed of convergence. Several rounds of comparative experiments are implemented on real SAR data with different resolutions and bands. The results demonstrate that the proposed method is robust to the speckle noise and intensity variations and could achieve refined segmentation for ship targets. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Automatic Target Recognition of High Resolution SAR/ISAR Images)
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16 pages, 2220 KiB  
Article
Bistatic Forward-Looking SAR Moving Target Detection Method Based on Joint Clutter Cancellation in Echo-Image Domain with Three Receiving Channels
by Zhutian Liu, Zhongyu Li, Huaiqin Yu, Junjie Wu, Yulin Huang and Jianyu Yang
Sensors 2018, 18(11), 3835; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18113835 - 08 Nov 2018
Cited by 9 | Viewed by 2614
Abstract
In bistatic forward-looking synthetic aperture radar (BFSAR) ground moving target detection (GMTD), the suppression of the strong and heterogeneous ground clutter is one of the most crucial and challenging issues. Due to the bistatic forward-looking mode and long observation time, Doppler ambiguity, range [...] Read more.
In bistatic forward-looking synthetic aperture radar (BFSAR) ground moving target detection (GMTD), the suppression of the strong and heterogeneous ground clutter is one of the most crucial and challenging issues. Due to the bistatic forward-looking mode and long observation time, Doppler ambiguity, range and Doppler cells migration and non-stationary characteristics will exist in clutter receives, which leads to severe performance degradation of the traditional method. Hence, this paper proposes a GMTD method based on joint clutter cancellation in echo-image domain for BFSAR to achieve effective GMTD in heterogeneous BFSAR clutter. First, the pre-filtering and keystone transform are applied to suppress Doppler ambiguity and correct range cell migration, respectively. Then, time-division space-time adaptive clutter cancellation is adopted to suppress clutter at the first time in the echo domain, which can eliminate the effect of the migration of Doppler cells. However, its performance will be severely degraded due to the strong non-stationary characteristic of BFSAR clutter. Finally, adaptive displaced phase center antenna is exploited to suppress the residual non-stationary BFSAR clutter in image domain. Experimental results have shown that the strong non-stationary clutter of BFSAR has been sufficiently suppressed by the proposed method and the SCNR provided is enough to detect a moving target well. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Automatic Target Recognition of High Resolution SAR/ISAR Images)
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15 pages, 2762 KiB  
Article
SAR Target Configuration Recognition via Product Sparse Representation
by Ming Liu, Shichao Chen, Fugang Lu and Mengdao Xing
Sensors 2018, 18(10), 3535; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18103535 - 19 Oct 2018
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 2437
Abstract
Sparse representation (SR) has been verified to be an effective tool for pattern recognition. Considering the multiplicative speckle noise in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, a product sparse representation (PSR) algorithm is proposed to achieve SAR target configuration recognition. To extract the essential [...] Read more.
Sparse representation (SR) has been verified to be an effective tool for pattern recognition. Considering the multiplicative speckle noise in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, a product sparse representation (PSR) algorithm is proposed to achieve SAR target configuration recognition. To extract the essential characteristics of SAR images, the product model is utilized to describe SAR images. The advantages of sparse representation and the product model are combined to realize a more accurate sparse representation of the SAR image. Moreover, in order to weaken the influences of the speckle noise on recognition, the speckle noise of SAR images is modeled by the Gamma distribution, and the sparse vector of the SAR image is obtained from q statistical standpoint. Experiments are conducted on the moving and stationary target acquisition and recognition (MSTAR) database. The experimental results validate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed algorithm, which can achieve higher recognition rates than some of the state-of-the-art algorithms under different circumstances. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Automatic Target Recognition of High Resolution SAR/ISAR Images)
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14 pages, 6305 KiB  
Article
An Operational Tool for the Automatic Detection and Removal of Border Noise in Sentinel-1 GRD Products
by Mattia Stasolla and Xavier Neyt
Sensors 2018, 18(10), 3454; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18103454 - 14 Oct 2018
Cited by 16 | Viewed by 4056
Abstract
The presence of border noise in Sentinel-1 Ground Range Detected (GRD) products is an undesired processing artifact that limits their full exploitation in a number of applications. All of the Sentinel-1 GRD products generated before March 2018—more than 800,000—are affected by this particular [...] Read more.
The presence of border noise in Sentinel-1 Ground Range Detected (GRD) products is an undesired processing artifact that limits their full exploitation in a number of applications. All of the Sentinel-1 GRD products generated before March 2018—more than 800,000—are affected by this particular type of noise. In March 2018, an official fix was deployed that solved the problem for a large portion of the newly generated products, but it did not cover the entire range of products, hence the need for an operational tool that is able to effectively and consistently remove border noise in an automated way. Currently, a few solutions have been proposed that try to address the problem, but all of them have limitations. The scope of this paper is therefore to present a new method based on mathematical morphology for the automatic detection and masking of border noise in Sentinel-1 GRD products that is able to overcome the existing limitations. To evaluate the performance of the method, a detailed numerical assessment was carried out, using, as a benchmark, the ‘Remove GRD Border Noise’ module integrated in ESA’s Sentinel Application Platform. The results showed that the proposed method is capable of very accurately removing the undesired noisy pixels from GRD images, regardless of their acquisition mode, polarization, or resolution and can cope with challenging features within the image scenes that typically affect other approaches. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Automatic Target Recognition of High Resolution SAR/ISAR Images)
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13 pages, 6039 KiB  
Article
Synthetic Aperture Radar Processing Approach for Simultaneous Target Detection and Image Formation
by Jifang Pei, Yulin Huang, Weibo Huo, Yuxuan Miao, Yin Zhang and Jianyu Yang
Sensors 2018, 18(10), 3377; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18103377 - 10 Oct 2018
Cited by 8 | Viewed by 3826
Abstract
Finding out interested targets from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery is an attractive but challenging problem in SAR application. Traditional target detection is independent on SAR imaging process, which is purposeless and unnecessary. Hence, a new SAR processing approach for simultaneous target detection [...] Read more.
Finding out interested targets from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery is an attractive but challenging problem in SAR application. Traditional target detection is independent on SAR imaging process, which is purposeless and unnecessary. Hence, a new SAR processing approach for simultaneous target detection and image formation is proposed in this paper. This approach is based on SAR imagery formation in time domain and human visual saliency detection. First, a series of sub-aperture SAR images with resolutions from low to high are generated by the time domain SAR imaging method. Then, those multiresolution SAR images are detected by the visual saliency processing, and the corresponding intermediate saliency maps are obtained. The saliency maps are accumulated until the result with a sufficient confidence level. After some screening operations, the target regions on the imaging scene are located, and only these regions are focused with full aperture integration. Finally, we can get the SAR imagery with high-resolution detected target regions but low-resolution clutter background. Experimental results have shown the superiority of the proposed approach for simultaneous target detection and image formation. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Automatic Target Recognition of High Resolution SAR/ISAR Images)
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16 pages, 7964 KiB  
Article
A Novel MIMO–SAR Solution Based on Azimuth Phase Coding Waveforms and Digital Beamforming
by Fang Zhou, Jiaqiu Ai, Zhangyu Dong, Jiajia Zhang and Mengdao Xing
Sensors 2018, 18(10), 3374; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18103374 - 09 Oct 2018
Cited by 8 | Viewed by 3664
Abstract
In multiple-input multiple-output synthetic aperture radar (MIMO–SAR) signal processing, a reliable separation of multiple transmitted waveforms is one of the most important and challenging issues, for the unseparated signal will degrade the performance of most MIMO–SAR applications. As a solution to this problem, [...] Read more.
In multiple-input multiple-output synthetic aperture radar (MIMO–SAR) signal processing, a reliable separation of multiple transmitted waveforms is one of the most important and challenging issues, for the unseparated signal will degrade the performance of most MIMO–SAR applications. As a solution to this problem, a novel APC–MIMO–SAR system is proposed based on the azimuth phase coding (APC) technique to transmit multiple waveforms simultaneously. Although the echo aliasing occurs in the time domain and Doppler domain, the echoes can be separated well without performance degradation by implementing the azimuth digital beamforming (DBF) technique, comparing to the performance of the orthogonal waveforms. The proposed MIMO–SAR solution based on the APC waveforms indicates the feasibility and the spatial diversity of the MIMO–SAR system. It forms a longer baseline in elevation, which gives the potential to expand the application of MIMO–SAR in elevation, such as improving the performance of multibaseline InSAR and three-dimensional SAR imaging. Simulated results on both a point target and distributed targets validate the effectiveness of the echo separation and reconstruction method with the azimuth DBF. The feasibility and advantage of the proposed MIMO–SAR solution based on the APC waveforms are demonstrated by comparing with the imaging result of the up- and down-chirp waveforms. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Automatic Target Recognition of High Resolution SAR/ISAR Images)
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15 pages, 5016 KiB  
Article
Wide-Angle, Ultra-Wideband ISAR Imaging of Vehicles and Drones
by Chenchen J. Li and Hao Ling
Sensors 2018, 18(10), 3311; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18103311 - 02 Oct 2018
Cited by 15 | Viewed by 4341
Abstract
In-situ, wide-angle, and ultra-wideband inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imaging of vehicles and drones is demonstrated using a portable ultra-wideband radar. In order to form well-focused ISAR images, motion compensation is performed before applying the k-space imaging algorithm. While the same basic [...] Read more.
In-situ, wide-angle, and ultra-wideband inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imaging of vehicles and drones is demonstrated using a portable ultra-wideband radar. In order to form well-focused ISAR images, motion compensation is performed before applying the k-space imaging algorithm. While the same basic motion compensation methodology is applied to both types of targets, a more complex motion model is needed to better capture the flight path of the drone. The resulting ISAR images clearly show the geometrical outline of the targets and highlight locations of prominent backscattering. The ISAR images are also assessed against images generated through instrumented targets or laboratory measurements, and the image quality is shown to be comparable. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Automatic Target Recognition of High Resolution SAR/ISAR Images)
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10 pages, 1335 KiB  
Article
Micro-Doppler Feature Extraction of Inverse Synthetic Aperture Imaging Laser Radar Using Singular-Spectrum Analysis
by Mingzhe Zhu, Xianda Zhou, Bo Zang, Baisheng Yang and Mengdao Xing
Sensors 2018, 18(10), 3303; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18103303 - 01 Oct 2018
Cited by 9 | Viewed by 2600
Abstract
Different from microwave radar, laser radar could be more sensitive to the micro-Doppler (m-D) effect due to its wave length. This limits the application of conventional methods, such as time–frequency based approach, since the processing needs a receiver with much higher sampling frequency [...] Read more.
Different from microwave radar, laser radar could be more sensitive to the micro-Doppler (m-D) effect due to its wave length. This limits the application of conventional methods, such as time–frequency based approach, since the processing needs a receiver with much higher sampling frequency than microwave radar. In this paper, a micro-Doppler feature extraction algorithm is proposed for the inverse synthetic aperture imaging laser radar (ISAIL). Singular-spectrum analysis (SSA) is employed for separation and reconstruction of the micro-Doppler and rigid body signal. Clear ISAIL image is obtained by minimum entropy criteria after echo signal decomposition. After theoretical derivation, the computation efficiency and ability of the proposed method is proved by the results of simulation and real data of An-26. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Automatic Target Recognition of High Resolution SAR/ISAR Images)
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18 pages, 2461 KiB  
Article
A Concurrent and Hierarchy Target Learning Architecture for Classification in SAR Application
by Mohamed Touafria and Qiang Yang
Sensors 2018, 18(10), 3218; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18103218 - 24 Sep 2018
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 2611
Abstract
This article discusses the issue of Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) on Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images. Through learning the hierarchy of features automatically from a massive amount of training data, learning networks such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) has recently achieved state-of-the-art results [...] Read more.
This article discusses the issue of Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) on Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images. Through learning the hierarchy of features automatically from a massive amount of training data, learning networks such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) has recently achieved state-of-the-art results in many tasks. To extract better features about SAR targets, and to obtain better accuracies, a new framework is proposed: First, three CNN models based on different convolution and pooling kernel sizes are proposed. Second, they are applied simultaneously on the SAR images to generate image features via extracting CNN features from different layers in two scenarios. In the first scenario, the activation vectors obtained from fully connected layers are considered as the final image features; in the second scenario, dense features are extracted from the last convolutional layer and then encoded into global image features through one of the commonly used feature coding approaches, which is Fisher Vectors (FVs). Finally, different combination and fusion approaches between the two sets of experiments are considered to construct the final representation of the SAR images for final classification. Extensive experiments on the Moving and Stationary Target Acquisition and Recognition (MSTAR) dataset are conducted. Experimental results prove the capability of the proposed method, as compared to several state-of-the-art methods. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Automatic Target Recognition of High Resolution SAR/ISAR Images)
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21 pages, 3630 KiB  
Article
A Lightweight Convolutional Neural Network Based on Visual Attention for SAR Image Target Classification
by Jiaqi Shao, Changwen Qu, Jianwei Li and Shujuan Peng
Sensors 2018, 18(9), 3039; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18093039 - 11 Sep 2018
Cited by 39 | Viewed by 6300
Abstract
With the continuous development of the convolutional neural network (CNN) concept and other deep learning technologies, target recognition in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images has entered a new stage. At present, shallow CNNs with simple structure are mostly applied in SAR image target [...] Read more.
With the continuous development of the convolutional neural network (CNN) concept and other deep learning technologies, target recognition in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images has entered a new stage. At present, shallow CNNs with simple structure are mostly applied in SAR image target recognition, even though their feature extraction ability is limited to a large extent. What’s more, research on improving SAR image target recognition efficiency and imbalanced data processing is relatively scarce. Thus, a lightweight CNN model for target recognition in SAR image is designed in this paper. First, based on visual attention mechanism, the channel attention by-pass and spatial attention by-pass are introduced to the network to enhance the feature extraction ability. Then, the depthwise separable convolution is used to replace the standard convolution to reduce the computation cost and heighten the recognition efficiency. Finally, a new weighted distance measure loss function is introduced to weaken the adverse effect of data imbalance on the recognition accuracy of minority class. A series of recognition experiments based on two open data sets of MSTAR and OpenSARShip are implemented. Experimental results show that compared with four advanced networks recently proposed, our network can greatly diminish the model size and iteration time while guaranteeing the recognition accuracy, and it can effectively alleviate the adverse effects of data imbalance on recognition results. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Automatic Target Recognition of High Resolution SAR/ISAR Images)
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19 pages, 5624 KiB  
Article
Target Recognition of SAR Images via Matching Attributed Scattering Centers with Binary Target Region
by Jian Tan, Xiangtao Fan, Shenghua Wang and Yingchao Ren
Sensors 2018, 18(9), 3019; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18093019 - 10 Sep 2018
Cited by 9 | Viewed by 3324
Abstract
A target recognition method of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is proposed via matching attributed scattering centers (ASCs) to binary target regions. The ASCs extracted from the test image are predicted as binary regions. In detail, each ASC is first transformed to the [...] Read more.
A target recognition method of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is proposed via matching attributed scattering centers (ASCs) to binary target regions. The ASCs extracted from the test image are predicted as binary regions. In detail, each ASC is first transformed to the image domain based on the ASC model. Afterwards, the resulting image is converted to a binary region segmented by a global threshold. All the predicted binary regions of individual ASCs from the test sample are mapped to the binary target regions of the corresponding templates. Then, the matched regions are evaluated by three scores which are combined as a similarity measure via the score-level fusion. In the classification stage, the target label of the test sample is determined according to the fused similarities. The proposed region matching method avoids the conventional ASC matching problem, which involves the assignment of ASC sets. In addition, the predicted regions are more robust than the point features. The Moving and Stationary Target Acquisition and Recognition (MSTAR) dataset is used for performance evaluation in the experiments. According to the experimental results, the method in this study outperforms some traditional methods reported in the literature under several different operating conditions. Under the standard operating condition (SOC), the proposed method achieves very good performance, with an average recognition rate of 98.34%, which is higher than the traditional methods. Moreover, the robustness of the proposed method is also superior to the traditional methods under different extended operating conditions (EOCs), including configuration variants, large depression angle variation, noise contamination, and partial occlusion. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Automatic Target Recognition of High Resolution SAR/ISAR Images)
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19 pages, 3371 KiB  
Article
Terahertz Image Detection with the Improved Faster Region-Based Convolutional Neural Network
by Jinsong Zhang, Wenjie Xing, Mengdao Xing and Guangcai Sun
Sensors 2018, 18(7), 2327; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18072327 - 18 Jul 2018
Cited by 43 | Viewed by 6092
Abstract
In recent years, terahertz imaging systems and techniques have been developed and have gradually become a leading frontier field. With the advantages of low radiation and clothing-penetrable, terahertz imaging technology has been widely used for the detection of concealed weapons or other contraband [...] Read more.
In recent years, terahertz imaging systems and techniques have been developed and have gradually become a leading frontier field. With the advantages of low radiation and clothing-penetrable, terahertz imaging technology has been widely used for the detection of concealed weapons or other contraband carried on personnel at airports and other secure locations. This paper aims to detect these concealed items with deep learning method for its well detection performance and real-time detection speed. Based on the analysis of the characteristics of terahertz images, an effective detection system is proposed in this paper. First, a lots of terahertz images are collected and labeled as the standard data format. Secondly, this paper establishes the terahertz classification dataset and proposes a classification method based on transfer learning. Then considering the special distribution of terahertz image, an improved faster region-based convolutional neural network (Faster R-CNN) method based on threshold segmentation is proposed for detecting human body and other objects independently. Finally, experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method for terahertz image detection. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Automatic Target Recognition of High Resolution SAR/ISAR Images)
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14 pages, 1796 KiB  
Article
Waveform Optimization for Target Estimation by Cognitive Radar with Multiple Antennas
by Yu Yao, Junhui Zhao and Lenan Wu
Sensors 2018, 18(6), 1743; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18061743 - 29 May 2018
Cited by 13 | Viewed by 2928
Abstract
A new scheme based on Kalman filtering to optimize the waveforms of an adaptive multi-antenna radar system for target impulse response (TIR) estimation is presented. This work aims to improve the performance of TIR estimation by making use of the temporal correlation between [...] Read more.
A new scheme based on Kalman filtering to optimize the waveforms of an adaptive multi-antenna radar system for target impulse response (TIR) estimation is presented. This work aims to improve the performance of TIR estimation by making use of the temporal correlation between successive received signals, and minimize the mean square error (MSE) of TIR estimation. The waveform design approach is based upon constant learning from the target feature at the receiver. Under the multiple antennas scenario, a dynamic feedback loop control system is established to real-time monitor the change in the target features extracted form received signals. The transmitter adapts its transmitted waveform to suit the time-invariant environment. Finally, the simulation results show that, as compared with the waveform design method based on the MAP criterion, the proposed waveform design algorithm is able to improve the performance of TIR estimation for extended targets with multiple iterations, and has a relatively lower level of complexity. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Automatic Target Recognition of High Resolution SAR/ISAR Images)
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16 pages, 2880 KiB  
Article
Adaptive ISAR Imaging of Maneuvering Targets Based on a Modified Fourier Transform
by Binbin Wang, Shiyou Xu, Wenzhen Wu, Pengjiang Hu and Zengping Chen
Sensors 2018, 18(5), 1370; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18051370 - 27 Apr 2018
Cited by 17 | Viewed by 3605
Abstract
Focusing on the inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imaging of maneuvering targets, this paper presents a new imaging method which works well when the target’s maneuvering is not too severe. After translational motion compensation, we describe the equivalent rotation of maneuvering targets by [...] Read more.
Focusing on the inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imaging of maneuvering targets, this paper presents a new imaging method which works well when the target’s maneuvering is not too severe. After translational motion compensation, we describe the equivalent rotation of maneuvering targets by two variables—the relative chirp rate of the linear frequency modulated (LFM) signal and the Doppler focus shift. The first variable indicates the target’s motion status, and the second one represents the possible residual error of the translational motion compensation. With them, a modified Fourier transform matrix is constructed and then used for cross-range compression. Consequently, the imaging of maneuvering is converted into a two-dimensional parameter optimization problem in which a stable and clear ISAR image is guaranteed. A gradient descent optimization scheme is employed to obtain the accurate relative chirp rate and Doppler focus shift. Moreover, we designed an efficient and robust initialization process for the gradient descent method, thus, the well-focused ISAR images of maneuvering targets can be achieved adaptively. Human intervention is not needed, and it is quite convenient for practical ISAR imaging systems. Compared to precedent imaging methods, the new method achieves better imaging quality under reasonable computational cost. Simulation results are provided to validate the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed method. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Automatic Target Recognition of High Resolution SAR/ISAR Images)
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21 pages, 16238 KiB  
Article
Detecting Inspection Objects of Power Line from Cable Inspection Robot LiDAR Data
by Xinyan Qin, Gongping Wu, Jin Lei, Fei Fan and Xuhui Ye
Sensors 2018, 18(4), 1284; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18041284 - 22 Apr 2018
Cited by 32 | Viewed by 5992
Abstract
Power lines are extending to complex environments (e.g., lakes and forests), and the distribution of power lines in a tower is becoming complicated (e.g., multi-loop and multi-bundle). Additionally, power line inspection is becoming heavier and more difficult. Advanced LiDAR technology is increasingly being [...] Read more.
Power lines are extending to complex environments (e.g., lakes and forests), and the distribution of power lines in a tower is becoming complicated (e.g., multi-loop and multi-bundle). Additionally, power line inspection is becoming heavier and more difficult. Advanced LiDAR technology is increasingly being used to solve these difficulties. Based on precise cable inspection robot (CIR) LiDAR data and the distinctive position and orientation system (POS) data, we propose a novel methodology to detect inspection objects surrounding power lines. The proposed method mainly includes four steps: firstly, the original point cloud is divided into single-span data as a processing unit; secondly, the optimal elevation threshold is constructed to remove ground points without the existing filtering algorithm, improving data processing efficiency and extraction accuracy; thirdly, a single power line and its surrounding data can be respectively extracted by a structured partition based on a POS data (SPPD) algorithm from “layer” to “block” according to power line distribution; finally, a partition recognition method is proposed based on the distribution characteristics of inspection objects, highlighting the feature information and improving the recognition effect. The local neighborhood statistics and the 3D region growing method are used to recognize different inspection objects surrounding power lines in a partition. Three datasets were collected by two CIR LIDAR systems in our study. The experimental results demonstrate that an average 90.6% accuracy and average 98.2% precision at the point cloud level can be achieved. The successful extraction indicates that the proposed method is feasible and promising. Our study can be used to obtain precise dimensions of fittings for modeling, as well as automatic detection and location of security risks, so as to improve the intelligence level of power line inspection. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Automatic Target Recognition of High Resolution SAR/ISAR Images)
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15 pages, 2238 KiB  
Article
Ship Detection from Ocean SAR Image Based on Local Contrast Variance Weighted Information Entropy
by Weibo Huo, Yulin Huang, Jifang Pei, Qian Zhang, Qin Gu and Jianyu Yang
Sensors 2018, 18(4), 1196; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18041196 - 13 Apr 2018
Cited by 47 | Viewed by 5150
Abstract
Ship detection from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is one of the crucial issues in maritime surveillance. However, due to the varying ocean waves and the strong echo of the sea surface, it is very difficult to detect ships from heterogeneous and strong [...] Read more.
Ship detection from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is one of the crucial issues in maritime surveillance. However, due to the varying ocean waves and the strong echo of the sea surface, it is very difficult to detect ships from heterogeneous and strong clutter backgrounds. In this paper, an innovative ship detection method is proposed to effectively distinguish the vessels from complex backgrounds from a SAR image. First, the input SAR image is pre-screened by the maximally-stable extremal region (MSER) method, which can obtain the ship candidate regions with low computational complexity. Then, the proposed local contrast variance weighted information entropy (LCVWIE) is adopted to evaluate the complexity of those candidate regions and the dissimilarity between the candidate regions with their neighborhoods. Finally, the LCVWIE values of the candidate regions are compared with an adaptive threshold to obtain the final detection result. Experimental results based on measured ocean SAR images have shown that the proposed method can obtain stable detection performance both in strong clutter and heterogeneous backgrounds. Meanwhile, it has a low computational complexity compared with some existing detection methods. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Automatic Target Recognition of High Resolution SAR/ISAR Images)
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17 pages, 4576 KiB  
Article
Micro-Doppler Effect Removal in ISAR Imaging by Promoting Joint Sparsity in Time-Frequency Domain
by Lin Sun and Weidong Chen
Sensors 2018, 18(4), 951; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18040951 - 23 Mar 2018
Cited by 10 | Viewed by 3854
Abstract
For micromotion scatterers with small rotating radii, the micro-Doppler (m-D) effect interferes with cross-range compression in inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imaging and leads to a blurred main body image. In this paper, a novel method is proposed to remove the m-D effect [...] Read more.
For micromotion scatterers with small rotating radii, the micro-Doppler (m-D) effect interferes with cross-range compression in inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imaging and leads to a blurred main body image. In this paper, a novel method is proposed to remove the m-D effect by promoting the joint sparsity in the time-frequency domain. Firstly, to obtain the time-frequency representations of the limited measurements, the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) was modelled by an underdetermined equation. Then, a new objective function was used to measure the joint sparsity of the STFT entries so that the joint sparse recovery problem could be formulated as a constrained minimization problem. Similar to the smoothed l 0 (SL0) algorithm, a steepest descend approach was used to minimize the new objective function, where the projection step was tailored to make it suitable for m-D effect removal. Finally, we utilized the recovered STFT entries to obtain the main body echoes, based on which cross-range compression could be realized without m-D interference. After all contaminated range cells were processed by the proposed method, a clear main body image could be achieved. Experiments using both the point-scattering model and electromagnetic (EM) computation validated the performance of the proposed method. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Automatic Target Recognition of High Resolution SAR/ISAR Images)
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