Multiset Canonical Correlations Analysis of Bidimensional Intrinsic Mode Functions for Automatic Target Recognition of SAR Images

A novel feature generation algorithm for the synthetic aperture radar image is designed in this study for automatic target recognition. As an adaptive 2D signal processing technique, bidimensional empirical mode decomposition is employed to generate multiscale bidimensional intrinsic mode functions from the original synthetic aperture radar images, which could better capture the broad spectral information and details of the target. And, the combination of the original image and decomposed bidimensional intrinsic mode functions could promisingly provide more discriminative information for correct target recognition. To reduce the high dimension of the original image as well as bidimensional intrinsic mode functions, multiset canonical correlations analysis is adopted to fuse them as a unified feature vector. The resultant feature vector highly reduces the high dimension while containing the inner correlations between the original image and decomposed bidimensional intrinsic mode functions, which could help improve the classification accuracy and efficiency. In the classification stage, the support vector machine is taken as the basic classifier to determine the target label of the test sample. In the experiments, the 10-class targets in the moving and stationary target acquisition and recognition dataset are classified to investigate the performance of the proposed method. Several operating conditions and reference methods are setup for comprehensive evaluation.