A New Method for Target Aspect Estimation in SAR Images

The target aspect estimation is important to Synthetic Aperture Radar Automatic Target Recognition (SAR ATR). Due to the nature of SAR imaging, the front edges are comparatively distinct and stable features in target images, and are suitable for target aspect estimation. In this paper, a new method is proposed for target aspect estimation. A simple adaptive threshold processing is used to extract the strong scatters in target area. By analysis on the projection distribution in different directions of the strong scatters, the normal front edge response is defined and is used as basis of the aspect estimation. The 90-degree correction is carried out on several unreliable results in the last step. According to the results of experiments on the MSTAR public database, the proposed method can achieve the optimal performance compared with the major edge fitting method, while has simpler processing flow and higher computing efficiency.