Combination of multiple decision principles based on sparse representation-based classification for target recognition of SAR image

A synthetic aperture radar (SAR) target recognition method using multiple decision principles in sparse representation-based classification (SRC) was proposed. The traditional SRC generally reconstructed the test sample on the global dictionary and calculated the reconstruction errors of individual training classes. And the decision was reached based on the minimum reconstruction error. However, because of the complexity of SAR target recognition, a single decision principle probably had low adaptivity to the extended operating conditions (EOC). Therefore, this paper employed the global minimum reconstruction, maximum coefficient energy, and local minimum reconstruction error principles to make decisions based on the solved coefficient vector from sparse representation. The global minimum reconstruction error principle directly adopted the traditional one. The maximum coefficient energy principle calculated the coefficient energies of different classes and made decision based on the maximum one. The local minimum reconstruction error principle represented and analyzed the test sample on the local dictionary so the azimuthal sensitivity of SAR imaging could be exploited. For the decision values from the three principles, they were transformed to the same type of probability vectors. Finally, the linear fusion was performed to combine their decisions. Experiments were conducted on the MSTAR dataset under situations including the standard operating condition (SOC), depression angle variance, noise corruption, and target occlusion. The results validate that the combination of multiple decision principles could effectively improve SAR target recognition performance.