Hierarchical Feature-Based Detection Method for SAR Targets Under Complex Environment

A reliable target detection method for Syn-thetic aperture radar (SAR) images is needed urgently with the wide application of SAR systems. The perfor-mance of conventional detection algorithms, such as Con-stant false alarm rate (CFAR), degrade significantly in low SCR or complex regions while the Human visual system (HVS) can identify targets of interest without knowing characteristics of the background even in complicated en-vironment. The combination of HVS with the SAR-ATR system may effectively achieve real-time multi-target de-tection in complex occlusion scenes. A new effective tar-get detection algorithm is put forward using hierarchical characteristics of targets. Inspired by different roles of the retina and visual cortex in the HVS, this detection algo-rithm is divided into coarse detection and fine detection stage. Two kinds of features based on the correlation be-tween target features and suspicious targets, namely over-all feature and refined feature, are used in these two stages respectively to extract real targets. Experimental results verify its correctness and effectiveness in complex environ-ment.