Synthetic aperture radar image correlation by use of preprocessing for enhancement of scattering centers

We demonstrate that a significant improvement can be obtained in the recogn ition of complicated synthetic aperture radar images taken from the Moving and Stationary Target Acquisitions and Recognition database. These images t ypically have a low number of scattering centers and high noise. We first p reprocess the images and the templates formed from them so that their scatt ering centers are enhanced. Our technique can produce high-quality performa nce in several correlation criteria. For realistic automatic target recogni tion systems, our approach should make it easy to implement optical recogni tion systems with binarized data for many different types of correlation fi lter and should have a great effect on feeding data-compressed (binarized) information into either digital or optical processors. (C) 2000 Optical Soc iety of America OCIS codes: 070.4560, 100.2000, 100.4550, 070.25807 070.259 0, 070.4340.