In this paper, we first propose ten new discrimination features of SAR images in the moving and stationary target acquisition and recognition (MSTAR) database. The Ada_MCBoost algorithm is then proposed to classify multiclass SAR targets. In the new algorithm, we introduce a novel large-margin loss function to design a multiclass classifier directly instead of decomposing the multiclass problem into a set of binary ones through the error-correcting output codes (ECOC) method. Finally, experiments show that the new features are helpful for SAR targets discrimination; the new algorithm had better recognition performance than three other contrast methods.

To overcome the target-aspect sensitivity in radar high resolution range profile (HRRP) recognition, a novel method called Improved Kernel Distance Fuzzy C-means Clustering Method (IKDFCM) is proposed in this paper, which introduces kernel function into fuzzy c-means clustering and relaxes the constraint in the membership matrix. The new method finds the underlying geometric structure information hiding in HRRP target and uses it to overcome the HRRP target-aspect sensitivity. The relaxing of constraint in the membership matrix improves anti-noise performance and robustness of the algorithm. Finally, experiments on three kinds of ground HRRP target under different SNRs and four UCI datasets demonstrate the proposed method not only has better recognition accuracy but also more robust than the other three comparison methods.

Target recognition in Millimeter-wave Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radiometer (MMW InSAR) imaging is always a crucial task. However, the recognition performance of conventional algorithms degrades when facing unpredictable noise interference in practical scenarios and information-loss caused by inverse imaging processing of InSAR. These difficulties make it very necessary to develop general-purpose denoising techniques and robust feature extractors for InSAR target recognition. In this paper, we propose a denoising convolutional neural network (D-CNN) and demonstrate its advantage on MMW InSAR automatic target recognition problem. Instead of directly feeding the MMW InSAR image to the CNN, the proposed algorithm utilizes the visibility function samples as the input of the fully connected denoising layer and recasts the target recognition as a data-driven supervised learning task, which learns the robust feature representations from the space-frequency domain. Comparing with traditional methods which act on the MMW InSAR output images, the D-CNN will not be affected by information-loss accused by inverse imaging process. Furthermore, experimental results on the simulated MMW InSAR images dataset illustrate that the D-CNN has superior immunity to noise, and achieves an outstanding performance on the recognition task.

Near-field beamforming has played an important role in many scenarios such as radar imaging and acoustic detection. In this paper, the near-field beamforming is implemented in the time modulated array with the harmonic. The beam pattern with a low sidelobe level in precise position is achieved by controlling the switching sequence in time modulated cross array. Numerical results verify the correctness of the proposed method.

Observed samples in wideband radar are always represented as nonlinear points in high dimensional space. In this paper, we consider the feature selection problem in the scenario of wideband radar target clustering. Inspired by manifold learning, we propose a novel feature selection algorithm, called Local Reconstruction Error Alignment (LREA), to select the features that can best preserve the underlying manifold structure. We first select the features that minimize the reconstruction error in every neighborhood. Then, we apply the alignment technique to extend the local optimal feature sequence to a global unique feature sequence. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Synthetic aperture interferometric radiometer (SAIR) is a powerful sensors for high-resolution imaging. However, because of the observation errors and small number of visibility sampling points, the accuracy of reconstructed images is usually low. To overcome this deficiency, a novel super-resolution imaging (SrI) method based on super-resolution reconstruction idea is proposed in this paper. In SrI method, sparse visibility functions are first measured at different observation locations. Then the sparse visibility functions are utilized to simultaneously construct the fusion visibility function and the fusion imaging model. Finally, the high-resolution image is reconstructed by solving the sparse optimization of fusion imaging model. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed SrI method has higher reconstruction accuracy and can improve the imaging quality of SAIR effectively.

Object detection in millimeter-wave Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radiometer (InSAR) imaging is always a crucial task. Facing unpredictable and numerous objects, traditional object detection models running after the InSAR system accomplishing imaging suffer from disadvantages such as complex clutter backgrounds, weak intensity of objects, Gibbs ringing, which makes a general purpose saliency detection system for InSAR necessary. This letter proposes a spectrum-based saliency detection algorithm to extract the salient regions from unknown backgrounds cooperating with sparse sensing InSAR imaging procedure. Directly using the interferometric value and sparse information of scenes in the basis of the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) domain adopted by InSAR imaging procedure, the proposed algorithm isolates the support of saliency region and then inversely transforms it back to calculate the saliency map. Comparing with other detecting algorithms which run after accomplishing imaging, the proposed algorithm will not be affected by information-loss accused by imaging procedure. Experimental results prove that it is effective and adaptable for millimeter-wave InSAR imaging.

This letter proposes the use of a novel time-modulated array structure to estimate the direction of arrival (DOA). Such a time-modulated coprime array (TMCA) is obtained by exchanging a coprime array's phase shifter for a radio frequency (RF) switch. Compared with a traditional coprime array, the TMCA's structure is much simpler, and it has a higher degree of freedom and resolution compared with a time-modulated uniform linear array (TMULA) due to its exploitation of the virtual array's equivalent signals. Theoretical analysis and experimental results have validated the effectiveness of the proposed structure and method and have confirmed that a TMCA's DOA performance is better than that of a TMULA using the same number of antennas.

The label estimation technique provides a new way to design semi-supervised learning algorithms. If the labels of the unlabeled data can be estimated correctly, the semi-supervised methods can be replaced by the corresponding supervised versions. In this paper, we propose a novel semi-supervised learning algorithm, called Geodesic Weighted Sparse Representation (GWSR), to estimate the labels of the unlabeled data. First, the geodesic distance and geodesic weight are calculated. The geodesic weight is utilized to reconstruct the labeled samples. The Euclidean distance between the reconstructed labeled sample and the unlabeled sample equals the geodesic distance between the original labeled sample and the unlabeled sample. Then, the unlabeled samples are sparsely reconstructed and the sparse reconstruction weight is obtained by minimizing the L1-norm. Finally, the sparse reconstruction weight is utilized to estimate the labels of the unlabeled samples. Experiments on synthetic data and USPS hand-written digit database demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Millimeter-wave synthetic aperture imaging radiometer (SAIR) is a powerful sensor for near-field high-resolution observations. However, the large receiver number and system complexity affect the application of SAIR. To overcome this shortage (receiver number), an accurate imaging algorithm based on compressed sensing (CS) theory is proposed in this paper. For reconstructing the brightness temperature images accurately from the sparse SAIR with fewer receivers, the proposed CS-based imaging algorithm is used to accomplish the sparse reconstruction with fewer visibility samples. The reconstruction is performed by minimizing the $l_{1}$ norm of the transformed image. Compared to the FFT-based methods based on Fourier transform, the required receiver number can be further reduced by this method. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed CS-based method has higher reconstruction accuracy for the sparse SAIR.

Conventional target recognition methods usually suffer from information-loss and target-aspect sensitivity when applied to radar high resolution range profile (HRRP) recognition. Thus, Effective establishment of robust and discriminatory feature representation has a significant performance improvement of practical radar applications. In this work, we present a novel feature extraction method, based on modified collaborative auto-encoder, for millimeter-wave radar HRRP recognition. The latent frame-specific weight vector is trained for samples in a frame, which contributes to retaining local information for different targets. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm obtains higher target recognition accuracy than conventional target recognition algorithms.

Aperture synthesis technology represents an effective approach to millimeter-wave radiometers for high-resolution observations. However, the application of synthetic aperture imaging radiometer (SAIR) is limited by its large number of antennas, receivers and correlators, which may increase noise and cause the image distortion. To solve those problems, this letter proposes a compressive regularization imaging algorithm, called CRIA, to reconstruct images accurately via combining the sparsity and the energy functional of target space. With randomly selected visibility samples, CRIA employs l1 norm to reconstruct the target brightness temperature and l2 norm to estimate the energy functional of it simultaneously. Comparisons with other algorithms show that CRIA provides higher quality target brightness temperature images at a lower data level.