Holism-based features for target classification in focused and complex-valued synthetic aperture radar imagery

Reductionism and holism are two worldviews underlying the fields of linear and nonlinear signal processing, respectively. Conventional radar resolution theory is motivated by the former view, and it is violated by nonlinear phase modulation induced by dispersive scattering typically associated with extended targets. Motivated by the latter view, this paper offers a new insight into the process of feature extraction for target-recognition applications in single-channel imagery output from synthetic aperture radar processors. Two novel frameworks for holism-based feature extraction are presented. The first framework is based solely on the often-ignored phase chip. The second framework uses the complex-valued 2-D synthetic aperture radar chip after it is transformed into a 1-D vector. Representative features are introduced under each framework. Further, for comparison purposes, baseline features from the power-detected chip are also considered. Three feature sets are extracted from the real-world MSTAR data set and used separately and combinatorially to design multiple instances of an eight-class support vector machine classifier. A classification accuracy of 93.42% is achieved for the holism-based features. This is in comparison to 73.63% for the baseline features. Using Fisher scoring to measure the information contained in each feature, top-ranked features from the first and second holism-based frameworks, respectively, are found to be 7 and 160 times those of the baseline features. Because the nonlinear phenomenon is resolution dependent, our proposed approach is expected to achieve even greater accuracy for synthetic aperture radar sensors with higher resolution.