Ship Recognition from Chaff Clouds with Sophisticated Polarimetric Decomposition

Yongzhen Li,Deliang Xiang,Canbin Hu,Yemin Liu,Wei Wang,Sinong Quan,Xuesong Wang

doi:10.3390/rs12111813

Yongzhen Li, Deliang Xiang + Show 5 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/rs12111813

Copy DOI

Abstract

Ship recognition from chaff cloud jamming is challenging since they have similar dimensions and radar cross sections. In this paper, a polarimetric recognition technique with sophisticated polarimetric decomposition is proposed. To this end, a seven-component model-based decomposition is first put forward by integrating three sophisticated scattering models, thus the dominant and local scattering of ships can be characterized accurately. According to the derived scattering contributions, a robust discrimination feature is then designed based on the concept of contrast and suppression. Coupled with the average scattering angle estimated from eigen-based decomposition, the constructed feature vector is inputted into the support vector machine and the recognition is finally fulfilled. The proposed method is tested on simulated and real polarimetric radar data and the results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves the highest recognition rate of over 98%, which outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

Highlights

IntroductionAiming at weighted chaff clouds, Li et al performed the recognition based on their polarimetric statistical property [8]
Simulated and real polarimetric radar data are applied for the verification, and the results demonstrate that easy implementation and a high recognition rate make the proposed method practical and effective
In order to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed discrimination feature, this subsection designs several composite methods according to control variate techniques for discussion and

Summary

Introduction

Aiming at weighted chaff clouds, Li et al performed the recognition based on their polarimetric statistical property [8]. It loses its effectiveness when dealing with targets whose dominant mechanism is no longer double-bounce scattering. To address the aforementioned issues, a discrimination feature on the basis of sophisticated model-based decomposition (MBD), along with a ship recognition scheme, is proposed in this paper. To highlight the scattering differences between the ships and chaff clouds, a scattering contribution-based discrimination feature is designed according to the concept of contrast and suppression. Simulated and real polarimetric radar data are applied for the verification, and the results demonstrate that easy implementation and a high recognition rate make the proposed method practical and effective

Methods

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion