Sparse coding of 2D-slice Zernike moments for SAR ATR

In this article, a new type of feature, named two-dimensional (2D)-slice Zernike moments, is proposed for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) automatic target recognition (ATR). Target features play an extremely important role in the ATR system. Pixels with different scattering intensities distribute in different positions in SAR images, which represent target inherent signatures determined by the target’s characteristics, including global structure and local details. To extract these various scattering signatures, we developed a feature extraction technique named 2D-slice Zernike moments (2DS-ZMS), which can capture target global and local scattering field distribution information. First, the multilayer 2D-slices of a SAR image are extracted by uniformly cutting the 3D display SAR image along the amplitude direction. Then Zernike moments of each 2D-slice are calculated. Finally, the 2DS-ZMS of the SAR image are formulated into a column vector, called the feature vector. The obtained feature vectors of the targets are fed into a newly developed classifier, i.e. the sparse representation-based classifier (SRC). By projecting the testing sample feature vector on the dictionary made up of training samples feature vectors, the sparse coefficients are solved. The minimum reconstruction residual is adopted as the judgement criterion for predicting the test sample’s class label. Experiments on the moving and stationary target acquisition and recognition (MSTAR) data set validate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method.