HRR Radar Signature Database Validation for ATR: An Information Theoretic Approach

The ability to make radar signature databases portable for use within similar sensor systems is critical to the affordability of future airborne signature exploitation systems. The capability to hybridize measured and synthetic signature database components will maximize the impact of the investment required to build complex radar signature databases. Radar target scattering mechanisms can be modeled and the signature signal model analyzed as a random process to enable portability and hybridization. Modal mutual information is developed as a measure of similarity for future use in the comparison of measured field data to modeled synthetic data. The inherent qualities of mutual information to be used in the context of the automatic target recognition problem are demonstrated using synthetic signature sets comprised of both "similar targets" and "dissimilar targets."