Robust method for ship recognition based on ISAR imaging using 3D model

This study develops a robust method for ship target recognition, based on inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) image matching with the template of 3D model. To deal with the difficulty of building template lib, the authors develop to use CAD model instead of the live radar data, which can be projected to the range-Doppler plane at any angle. In the study, the method of matching between the observed ISAR image and candidate target image of model is also proposed, including feature extraction and scoring for recognition. In addition, influences of estimation accuracy for projection are analysed and simulated. Finally, recognition results obtained with simulated data are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.