A Multi-View SAR ATR Optimal Observation Path Planning Method

Abstract

Multi-view SAR images contain richer target information than single-view, which is beneficial to synthetic aperture radar automatic target recognition (SAR ATR). It is a huge challenge to select the best observation viewpoints and the most suitable flight path for multi-view SAR ATR in an unknown environment. Therefore, we propose a multi-view SAR ATR optimal observation path planning method in this paper. The geometrical and the optimization mathematical models based on the task requirements are constructed, and the convolutional neural networks with two inputs are designed as the base classifier. An autonomous path planning method forms the best observation path planning in the absence of global information of the surroundings. Thus the selection of the optimal viewpoint for multi-view SAR ATR is solved by the path search algorithm. The multi-view SAR images are collected on the solved optimal viewpoints, and the final recognition result is obtained by the base classifiers ensemble. Experimental results based on the moving and stationary target acquisition and recognition (MSTAR) dataset have shown that the proposed method obtains superiority in optimal observation path planning.