Nonlinear feature extraction for MMW image classification: a supervised approach

摘要

The specular nature of Radar imagery causes problems for ATR as small changes to the configuration of targets can result in significant changes to the resulting target signature. This adds to the challenge of constructing a classifier that is both robust to changes in target configuration and capable of generalizing to previously unseen targets. Here, we describe the application of a nonlinear Radial Basis Function (RBF) transformation to perform feature extraction on millimetre-wave (MMW) imagery of target vehicles. The features extracted were used as inputs to a nearest-neighbour classifier to obtain measures of classification performance. The training of the feature extraction stage was by way of a loss function that quantified the amount of data structure preserved in the transformation to feature space. In this paper we describe a supervised extension to the loss function and explore the value of using the supervised training process over the unsupervised approach and compare with results obtained using a supervised linear technique (Linear Discriminant Analysis ― LDA). The data used were Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar (ISAR) images of armoured vehicles gathered at 94GHz and were categorized as Armoured Personnel Carrier, Main Battle Tank or Air Defence Unit. We find that the form of supervision used in this work is an advantage when the number of features used for classification is low, with the conclusion that the supervision allows information useful for discrimination between classes to be distilled into fewer features. When only one example of each class is used for training purposes, the LDA results are comparable to the RBF results. However, when an additional example is added per class, the RBF results are significantly better than those from LDA. Thus, the RBF technique seems better able to make use of the extra knowledge available to the system about variability between different examples of the same class.