• The Journal of Korean Institute of Electromagnetic Engineering and Science
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• v.22 no.11
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• pp.1063-1069
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• 2011

NCTR(Non-Cooperative Target Recognition) and ATR(Automatic Target Recognition) are methodologies to identify military targets using radar, optical, and infrared images. Among them, a strategy to recognize ground targets using synthetic aperature radar(SAR) images is called SAR ATR. In general, SAR ATR consists of three sequential stages: detection, discrimination and classification. In this paper, a modification of the polar mapping classifier(PMC) to identify inverse SAR(ISAR) images has been made in order to apply it to SAR ATR. In addition, a preprocessing scheme can mitigate the effect from the clutter, and information on the shadow is employed to improve the classification accuracy.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.38 no.3
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• pp.283-298
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• 2022

As Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image can be acquired regardless of the weather and day or night, it is highly recommended to be used for Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) in the fields of surveillance, reconnaissance, and national security. However, there are some limitations in terms of cost and operation to build various and vast amounts of target images for the SAR-ATR system. Recently, interest in the development of an ATR system based on simulated SAR images using a target model is increasing. Attributed Scattering Center (ASC) matching and template matching mainly used in SAR-ATR are applied to target classification. The method based on ASC matching was developed by World View Vector (WVV) feature reconstruction and Weighted Bipartite Graph Matching (WBGM). The template matching was carried out by calculating the correlation coefficient between two simulated images reconstructed with adjacent points to each other. For the performance analysis of the two proposed methods, the Synthetic and Measured Paired Labeled Experiment (SAMPLE) dataset was used, which has been recently published by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). We conducted experiments under standard operating conditions, partial target occlusion, and random occlusion. The performance of the ASC matching is generally superior to that of the template matching. Under the standard operating condition, the average recognition rate of the ASC matching is 85.1%, and the rate of the template matching is 74.4%. Also, the ASC matching has less performance variation across 10 targets. The ASC matching performed about 10% higher than the template matching according to the amount of target partial occlusion, and even with 60% random occlusion, the recognition rate was 73.4%.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Military Science and Technology
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.461-469
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• 2010

In this paper, we have proposed an improved fusion method of detection features which can enhance the detection probability under the given false alarm rate in the prescreening stage of SAR ATR(Synthetic Aperture Radar Automatic Target Recognition) system. Since the detection features have the positive correlation, the detection performance can be improved if the joint probability distribution of detection features is considered in the fusion process. The detection region is designed as a simple piecewise linear function which can be represented by few parameters. The parameters for the detection region can be derived by training the sample SAR images to maximize the detection probability with the given false alarm rate. Simulation result shows that the detection performance of the proposed method is improved for all combinations of detection features.

• Journal of the Institute of Convergence Signal Processing
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.12-18
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• 2001

SAR radar and FLIR images, which are taken from sensors on aircrafts or satellites, are compressed prior to transmission to facilitate rapid transfer through the limited bandwidth channels. In this case, it is important that it achieves compression ratio as high as possible as well as high target detection rate. In this paper a joint ATR-compression system based on the subband coding and VQ is proposed, which utilizes the encoder as a predictor or classifier for target detection. Simulation result shows that the proposed system achieves a relatively high level of target detection performance as well as a high compression ratio over 200:1.

• 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.

• Proceedings of the KSRS Conference
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• v.1
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• pp.516-519
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• 2006

Military targets in SAR images are not distinguished easily unlike those in optical images, because targets are only dozens of pixels and they have many corner reflectors sensitive to the incidence angle of radar signals. Due to those problems, SAR image analysts have difficulties in recognizing military targets captured by SAR images. Furthermore, manual analysis cannot respond promptly enough to rapidly changing situations such as battle field. We need automated analysis to solve these problems. In this paper, we analyzed algorithms for prescreening of military targets in SAR images. We implemented some prescreening algorithms and tested the algorithms using SAR data. As a result, we will report performance of the tested prescreening algorithms.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.23 no.5
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• pp.145-154
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• 2022

Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) technology is emerging as a core technology of Future Combat Systems (FCS). Conventional ATR is performed based on IMINT (image information) collected from the SAR sensor, and various image-based deep learning models are used. However, with the development of IT and sensing technology, even though data/information related to ATR is expanding to HUMINT (human information) and SIGINT (signal information), ATR still contains image oriented IMINT data only is being used. In complex and diversified battlefield situations, it is difficult to guarantee high-level ATR accuracy and generalization performance with image data alone. Therefore, we propose a knowledge graph-based ATR method that can utilize image and text data simultaneously in this paper. The main idea of the knowledge graph and deep model-based ATR method is to convert the ATR image and text into graphs according to the characteristics of each data, align it to the knowledge graph, and connect the heterogeneous ATR data through the knowledge graph. In order to convert the ATR image into a graph, an object-tag graph consisting of object tags as nodes is generated from the image by using the pre-trained image object recognition model and the vocabulary of the knowledge graph. On the other hand, the ATR text uses the pre-trained language model, TF-IDF, co-occurrence word graph, and the vocabulary of knowledge graph to generate a word graph composed of nodes with key vocabulary for the ATR. The generated two types of graphs are connected to the knowledge graph using the entity alignment model for improvement of the ATR performance from images and texts. To prove the superiority of the proposed method, 227 documents from web documents and 61,714 RDF triples from dbpedia were collected, and comparison experiments were performed on precision, recall, and f1-score in a perspective of the entity alignment..

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Military Science and Technology
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.12-21
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• 2021

For successful automatic target recognition(ATR) with synthetic aperture radar(SAR) imagery, SAR target images of the database should have the identical or highly similar resolution with those collected from SAR sensors. However, it is time-consuming or infeasible to construct the multiple databases with different resolutions depending on the operating SAR system. In this paper, an approach for resolution conversion of SAR target images is proposed based on conditional generative adversarial network(cGAN). First, a number of pairs consisting of SAR target images with two different resolutions are obtained via SAR simulation and then used to train the cGAN model. Finally, the model generates the SAR target image whose resolution is converted from the original one. The similarity analysis is performed to validate reliability of the generated images. The cGAN model is further applied to measured MSTAR SAR target images in order to estimate its potential for real application.

• 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.17 no.3
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• pp.364-377
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• 2014

In this paper, we have developed a target recognition algorithm based on a template matching technique using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images. For efficient computations, Radon transform-based azimuth estimation algorithm was used with the template matching. MSTAR data set was divided into two groups according to the depression angles, which were a train set and a test set. Template data were generated by rotating and cropping chips which were from MSTAR train set using the azimuth estimation algorithm. Then the template matching process between test data and template data was performed under various conditions. Performance variation according to contrast enhancement preprocessing which is scarce in open literature was also presented. The analysis results show that the target recognition algorithm could be useful for the automatic target recognition using SAR images.