A Monte Carlo simulation based approach to a priori performance prediction for target detection and recognition in cluttered synthetic aperture radar imagery

Multi-sensor systems for wide area surveillance and tracking are an area of increasing interest for civil and military applications. In order to design these systems to reliably achieve a specification, performance models are required for each of the system components, to allow synthesis of the overall system performance. The work presented in this paper addresses the problem of a performance model for the target detection and recognition performance of a SAR sensor component in a surveillance system. A Monte Carlo simulation based approach is described which is used to predict the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) as a function of the target, the clutter background and the sensor specification for a template matching recognition algorithm. Some initial results from an experimental validation trial are presented and it is concluded that there is sufficient similarity between the current model´s predictions of performance and the actual performance achieved with representative real data to encourage further development work.