Radar Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) and Non-Cooperative Target Recognition (NCTR)

Book excerpt: Radar Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) and NonCooperative Target Recognition (NCTR) captures material presented by leading international experts at a NATO lecture series and explores both the fundamentals of classification techniques applied to data from a variety of radar modes and selected advanced techniques at the forefront of research. The ability to detect and locate targets by day or night, over wide areas, regardless of weather conditions has long made radar a key sensor in many military and civil applications. However, the ability to automatically and reliably distinguish different targets represents a difficult challenge, although steady progress has been made over the past couple of decades. This book explores both the fundamentals of classification techniques applied to data from a variety of radar modes and selected advanced techniques at the forefront of research. Topics include: the problem as applied to the ground, air and maritime domains; impact of image quality on the overall target recognition performance; performance of different approaches to the classifier algorithm; improvement in performance to be gained when a target can be viewed from more than one perspective; ways in which natural systems perform target recognition; impact of compressive sensing; advances in change detection, including coherent change detection; and challenges and directions for future research.