Specific imaging effects that are caused mainly by the range measurement principle of a radar device, its much lower frequency range as compared to the optical spectrum, the slanted imaging geometry and certainly the limited spatial resolution complicates the interpretation of radar signatures decisively. Especially the coherent image formation which causes unwanted speckle noise aggravates the problem of visually recognizing target objects. Fully automatic approaches with acceptable false alarm rates are therefore an even harder challenge. At the Microwaves and Radar Institute of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) the development of methods to implement a robust overall processing workflow for automatic target recognition (ATR) out of high resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image data is under progress. The heart of the general approach is to use time series exploitation for the former detection step and simulation-based signature matching for the subsequent recognition. This paper will show the overall ATR chain as a proof of concept for the special case of airplane recognition on image data from the space borne SAR sensor TerraSAR-X.
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