Statistical Modeling With Label Constraint for Radar Target Recognition

Motivated by the problem of radar target recognition, we develop a label-aided factor analysis (LA-FA) model for statistical modeling of high-resolution range profile (HRRP) under the prerequisite that the HRRP data are Gaussian distributed. The LA-FA model is the extension of the multitask learning-based factor analysis (MTL-FA) model, which is mainly applied to the recognition problem with small training data size. Compared to the MTL-FA model, our LA-FA model introduces the discrete class labels via Sigmoid-Bernoulli hierarchy to restrict the learning of model parameters, which offers the potential to enhance the separability of statistical models from different classes, thus beneficial to the improvement of recognition capability. In addition, since the noise level of a test sample is usually different from those of the training samples in the real application, we introduce a noise-robust modification method for Gaussian-based models. The proposed modification method is implemented by updating the noise level parameter of the statistical model according to the estimated signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of test HRRP. Experiments on measured HRRP data demonstrate the better recognition performance of the LA-FA model with limited training data and our noise-robust model modification method under low test SNR. Especially, when there are 20 training HRRP samples per frame, the recognition rate of our LA-FA model is 7% higher than that of the MTL-FA model, and moreover, the recognition accuracy of the noise-robust LA-FA model is 3% higher than that of the LA-FA model without modification under the condition of SNR = 15 dB.