Wavefront feature extraction for SAR target recognition

Abstract

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) target feature extraction is a key technology for SAR target recognition. The existing SAR feature extraction methods mainly focus on amplitude information of the SAR image in spite of phase information. This study proposes a new feature extraction method introducing from concept of wavefront in optics domain. The Zernike polynomials are utilised to approximate the SAR echo wavefront, and these coefficients of Zernike polynomials are used as a new target feature for aiding SAR target recognition. Moreover, an experiment is carried out to prove that this method is effective about a target consisted of two scatters with different spacing between them.