• Journal of the Korea Institute of Military Science and Technology
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• v.25 no.5
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• pp.462-475
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• 2022

Different from the field of electro-optical(EO) image analysis, there has been less interest in similarity metrics between synthetic aperture radar(SAR) target images. A reliable and objective similarity analysis for SAR target images is expected to enable the verification of the SAR measurement process or provide the guidelines of target CAD modeling that can be used for simulating realistic SAR target images. For this purpose, this paper presents a similarity analysis method based on the siamese network that quantifies the subjective assessment through the distance learning of similar and dissimilar SAR target image pairs. The proposed method is applied to MSTAR SAR target images of slightly different depression angles and the resultant metrics are compared and analyzed with qualitative evaluation. Since the image similarity is somewhat related to recognition performance, the capacity of the proposed method for target recognition is further checked experimentally with the confusion matrix.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Military Science and Technology
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• v.22 no.6
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• pp.735-744
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• 2019

One of the key factors for recognition performance in the automatic target recognition for synthetic aperture radar imagery(SAR-ATR) system is reliability of the SAR target database. To achieve optimal performance, the database should be constructed using the images obtained under the same operating condition as the SAR sensor. However, it is impractical to have the extensive set of real-world SAR images, and thus those from the electro magnetic prediction tool with 3-D CAD models are suggested as an alternative where their reliability can be always questionable. In this paper, a method for similarity assessment between target SAR images is presented inspired by the fact that a target SAR image is mainly characterized by the features of scattering centers. The method is demonstrated using a variety of examples and quantitatively measures the similarity related to reliability. Its assessment performance is further compared with that of the existing metric, structural similarity(SSIM).

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Military Science and Technology
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• v.25 no.5
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• pp.443-461
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• 2022

Target Detection in synthetic aperture radar(SAR) image is critical for military and national defense. In this paper, we propose YOLOv4-Attention architecture which adds attention modules to YOLOv4 backbone architecture to complement the feature extraction ability for SAR target detection with high accuracy. For training and testing our framework, we present new SAR embedding datasets based on MSTAR SAR public datasets which are about poor environments for target detection such as various clutter, crowded objects, various object size, close to buildings, and weakness of signal-to-clutter ratio. Experiments show that our Attention YOLOv4 architecture outperforms original YOLOv4 architecture in SAR image target detection tasks in poor environments for target detection.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Military Science and Technology
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.147-155
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• 2024

Based on the recently developed deep learning technology, many studies have been conducted on deep learning networks that simultaneously detect and classify targets of interest in synthetic aperture radar(SAR) images. Although numerous research results have been derived mainly with the open SAR ship datasets, there is a lack of work carried out on the deep learning network aimed at detecting and classifying SAR ground targets and trained with the synthetic dataset generated from electromagnetic scattering simulations. In this respect, this paper presents the deep learning network trained with the synthetic dataset and applies it to detecting and classifying real SAR ground targets. With experiment results, this paper also analyzes the network performance according to the composition ratio between the real measured data and the synthetic data involved in network training. Finally, the summary and limitations are discussed to give information on the future research direction.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
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• v.43 no.1
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• pp.40-48
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• 2015

In this paper, we suggest a measurement modeling of the RF seeker using the ISAR(Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar) image. Reference scattering points are extracted first from ISAR images which are changed according to target attitude. And then uncertainties included in RF seeker measurement such as noise strength, blink, and boresight error are added to the reference scattering points. The proposed measurement model of the RF seeker can be used to develop various kinds of target tracking algorithms.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
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• v.41 no.7
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• pp.588-595
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• 2013

Airborne SAR system is the imaging Radar system that is loaded on a manned or unmanned aircraft, which is in charge of high quality image acquisition and moving target detection. This paper describes the operational requirements for the Airborne SAR system and suggests the operational concept to satisfy the requirements. To be specific, it describes the interface with airborne system, state definition and transition, operation mode based on mission definition file, fault management, and data storing and transmission concept. Finally, it gives the ground test results to verify the SAR system operational concept.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.35 no.5_1
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• pp.737-750
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• 2019

Information of target changes in inaccessible areas is very important in terms of national security. Fast and accurate change detection of targets is very important to respond quickly. Spaceborne synthetic aperture radar can acquire images with high accuracy regardless of weather conditions and solar altitude. With the recent increase in the number of SAR satellites, it is possible to acquire images with less than one day temporal resolution for the same area. This advantage greatly increases the availability of change detection for inaccessible areas. Commonly available information in satellite SAR is amplitude and phase information, and change detection techniques have been developed based on each technology. Those are amplitude Change Detection (ACD), Coherence Change Detection (CCD). Each algorithm differs in the preprocessing process for accurate automatic classification technique according to the difference of information characteristics and the final detection result of each algorithm. Therefore, by analyzing the academic research trends for ACD and CCD, each technologies can be complemented. The goal of this paper is identifying current issues of SAR change detection techniques by collecting research papers. This study would help to find the prerequisites for SAR change detection and use it to conduct periodic detection research on inaccessible areas.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Military Science and Technology
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.175-186
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• 2021

In the field of automatic target recognition(ATR) with synthetic aperture radar(SAR) imagery, it is usually impractical to obtain SAR target images covering a full range of aspect views. When the database consists of SAR target images with limited angular diversity, it can lead to performance degradation of the SAR-ATR system. To address this problem, this paper proposes a deep learning-based method where channel attention modules(CAMs) are inserted to a convolutional neural network(CNN). Motivated by the idea of the squeeze-and-excitation(SE) network, the CAM is considered to help improve recognition performance by selectively emphasizing discriminative features and suppressing ones with less information. After testing various CAM types included in the ResNet18-type base network, the SE CAM and its modified forms are applied to SAR target recognition using MSTAR dataset with different reduction ratios in order to validate recognition performance improvement under the limited angular diversity condition.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Military Science and Technology
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.30-44
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• 2022

The advent of deep learning-based algorithms has facilitated researches on target detection from synthetic aperture radar(SAR) imagery. While most of them concentrate on detection tasks for ships with open SAR ship datasets and for aircraft from SAR scenes of airports, there is relatively scarce researches on the detection of SAR ground vehicle targets where several adverse factors such as high false alarm rates, low signal-to-clutter ratios, and multiple targets in close proximity are predicted to degrade the performances. In this paper, a dataset of ground vehicle targets acquired from TerraSAR-X(TSX) satellite SAR images is presented. Then, both detection and instance segmentation are simultaneously carried out on this dataset based on the deep learning-based Mask R-CNN. Finally, this paper shows the future research directions to further improve the performances of detecting the SAR ground vehicle targets.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Military Science and Technology
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.680-687
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• 2014

PGA(phase gradient autofocus) has been widely used to remove motion induced phase errors in the ISAR(inverse synthetic aperture radar) imaging. The critical process for the processing time and image quality is windowing stage in PGA. In this paper, the new method to determine window size based on polynomial least square approximation is proposed. Moreover, dominant range bins are selected for efficient phase error estimation, which improve image quality and speed up convergence. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm provides high quality ISAR images while computational efficiency of inherent PGA is retained.