Synthetic Aperture Radar Quantized Gray Scale Reference Automatic Target Recognition algorithm

This paper presents a Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) baseline algorithm that uses a quantized grayscale matching (QGM) algorithm.(10) QGM is a classifier that uses a template matching approach to identify the target, has been throughly tested as part of the MSTAR program,(10) and has shown to be robust to fluctuation in the absolute amplitude. A performance study is conducted to show how translation and obscuration/shadowing affects the performance of the QGM algorithm for SAR synthetic data at multiple different resolutions. This QGM implementation along with the synthetic data generation capability allows researchers to test the susceptibility of QGM to different operating conditions and, in addition, provides a baseline algorithm for comparison.