Radar HRRP Statistical Recognition: Parametric Model and Model Selection

Statistical modeling for radar high-resolution range profile (HRRP) is a challenging task in radar HRRP statistical recognition. Theoretical analysis and experimental results show that elements in an HRRP sample are statistically correlated and non-Gaussian distributed. First, this paper introduces three joint-Gaussian models, i.e., subspace approximation model, probability principal components analysis (PPCA) model and factor analysis (FA) model, into radar HRRP statistical recognition. Due to the experimental results, we can have the conclusion that the jointly non-Gaussian distributed HRRP samples approximately follow the joint-Gaussian distribution described by FA model. Therefore, we can apply FA model to radar HRRP statistical recognition rather than a joint-Gaussian mixture model, e.g., PPCA mixture model or FA mixture model, which is a more accurate choice for modeling non-Gaussian distributed correlations in multidimensional data but with high learning complexity and large computation burden, and the difficulty in the statistical modeling for HRRP samples is largely reduced. Second, this paper concerns model selection of FA model in radar HRRP statistical recognition, in which there are two issues, i.e., the partition of target-aspect frames and the determination of the number of factors in each frame. Based on the Akaike information criterion (AIC) and the Bayes' information criterion (BIC), an iterated algorithm for model selection is proposed in this paper, which can automatically give the optimal aspect-frame boundaries and determine the optimal number of factors in each aspect-frame. The recognition experiments based on measured data show that the proposed adaptive partition approach can further improve the recognition performance with higher recognition efficiency.