New Radar Exploitation Methods for Combat Identification

ABSTRACT: Database sustainability is a fundamental challenge for supporting assisted and automatic target recognition algorithms. We propose a new approach to SAR/HRR exploitation algorithms that emphasizes simple, well-understood target morphology and the corresponding scattering physics generated by this morphology. This approach trades the potentially superior, but vastly more costly approach of large high fidelity training sets for simplistic models which capture key salient scattering phenomenology. BENEFIT: Key benefits include, 1) reduced cost to implement HRR and SAR exploitation algorithms and 2) databases that can be readily updated in the field to include additional target knowledge. Commercialization opportunities for this work exist in the areas of data mining, face recognition, sensor fusion and semantic representations of sensor data.