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Shape-Based Recognition Of Targets In Synthetic Aperture Radar Images Using Elliptical Fourier Descriptors, Louis P. Nicoli, Georgios C. Anagnostopoulos

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

This paper primarily investigates the use of shape-based features by an Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) system to classify various types of targets in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images. In specific, shapes of target outlines are represented via Elliptical Fourier Descriptors (EFDs), which, in turn, are utilized as recognition features. According to the proposed ATR approach, a segmentation stage first isolates the target region from shadow and ground clutter via a sequence of fast thresholding and morphological operations. Next, a number of EFDs are computed that can sufficiently describe the salient characteristics of the target outline. Finally, a classification stage based …