Automatic recognition of ISAR ship images

Inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) produces images of ships at sea which human operators can be trained to recognize. Because ISAR uses the ship's own varying angular motions (roll, pitch, and yaw) for cross-range resolution, the viewing aspect and cross-range scale factor are continually changing on time scales of a few seconds. This and other characteristics of ISAR imaging make the problem of automatic recognition of ISAR images quite distinct from the recognition of optical images. The nature of ISAR imaging of ships, and single-frame and multiple-frame techniques for segmentation, feature extraction, and classification are described. Results are shown which illustrate a capability for automatic recognition of ISAR ship imagery.