Improved Ship and Small Boat Classification Using Hybrid Synthetic Aperture Radar - Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR-ISAR) Imaging

RDRTec's baseline Maritime Classification Aid (MCA) system relies heavily on the use of profile view ISAR dwells to perform target classification. The ability to accurately estimate a targets aspect angle is important to classification performance as ship length is a major discriminant and aspect angle is required to translate measure projected target length to ship length. Two important categories of enhancements are planned under this effort. The first is making use of imaging data in addition to traditional tracker data to estimate target aspect angle and the other is expanding the dimensionality of the target feature set to reduce reliance on ISAR profile dwells.