Ship target recognition using high resolution range profiles based on FMT and SVM

This paper presented here introduces a technique for automatic recognition of ship targets from high range resolution range profiles. The technique incorporates Fourier-Mellin transform (FMT) and support vector machine (SVM) to identify ship targets. According to the shift invariance of the Fourier transform and scale invariance of the Mellin transform, the high resolution range profiles are processed using FMT to form the feature vectors. Within the recognizer, the multi-class SVM is used based on binary tree, which can reduce the number of SVM classifiers and repetitive training samples effectively. The recognition results from simulation data and measurement data of ship target range profiles prove the validity and robustness of the method proposed.