Aircraft recognition in high resolution SAR images using saliency map and scattering structure features

Scattering structure features of targets is of great importance for Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image analysis. In this paper, a novel algorithm for aircraft recognition in high resolution apron area of SAR images is proposed. The algorithm combines the strength of gradient saliency map and scattering structure features to improve accuracy and efficiency. Specially, Constant False-Alarm Rate (CFAR) algorithm is carried out to segment images. Then, a new efficient object locating method based on directional local gradient map is proposed to detect aircraft targets. Then, the candidate slices as well as template slices are modeled using Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), which will be treated as structure features. In the recognition stage, a novel similarity measurement algorithm based on Kullback-Leibler Divergence for GMM models is proposed for classification. We conduct experiments on the dataset with 3.0m resolution and the recognition results demonstrate the accuracy of our proposed method.