ISAR image analysis by subspace method: automatic extraction and identification of ship profile

Abstract

This paper deals with automatic identification of ships in images produced by inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR). The ISAR technique reconstructs a rapidly updating sequence of range-Doppler image frames of the target. Due to the physics of imaging based on the target's angular motions, however, images are invariably noisy, and not all frames contain equally useful information. The thrust of this research is to cope with these issues by introducing: (i) a multiframe algorithm to stably extract profiling as a basic feature reflecting the entire characteristics of a target; and (ii) subspace analysis for identification of the extracted profiling especially using the recently proposed constrained mutual subspace method (CMSM). Through preliminary experiments we demonstrate the effective performance of the proposed scheme.