Classification of flowers by bats: comparison with the radar case

In recent years, with the development of high range resolution radars, the desire to be able to identify targets under all weather and clutter conditions has become of great importance. This is an activity carried out with great success by echolocating mammals such as nectar feeding bats that are able to detect and select flowers of bat-pollinated plants even in a dense clutter environment. In this paper data consisting of acoustically generated high range resolution profiles of four bat pollinated flower heads are analysed. Multi perspective classification performance is assessed and compared with the radar case. There are close parallels that suggest lessons can be learnt from nature.