2017 11th European Conference on Antennas and Propagation (EUCAP)
Feature Extraction Based on 2D Compressive
Sensing for SAR Automatic Target Recognition
Baiyuan Ding1, Gongjian Wen1, Fen Ye2, Xiaohong Huang1, Xiaoliang Yang1
1
Science and Technology on Automatic Target Recognition Laboratory, National University of Defense Technology,
Changsha, China, DingBaiyuan_NUDT@163.com*
2
Huayin Ordnance Test Center of China, Huayin, China
Abstract—This paper proposes a new feature extraction
method for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images with
application to automatic target recognition (ATR). The original
SAR image is first represented by a sparse image containing
only a few dominant scattering centers (SCs). According to the
theory of 2D compressive sensing (CS), a sparse image can be
reconstructed from a low dimensional matrix with little
distortion. Therefore, we use 2D random projection to extract
features from the sparse image. The proposed method directly
works on the 2D images thus avoiding the conversion of 2D
matrices to vectors. Based on the extracted feature, the nearest
neighbor classifier (NNC) is employed for target recognition.
Experiments are conducted on the moving and stationary
target acquisition and recognition (MSTAR) to evaluate the
validity of the proposed method. Comparison with other
methods demonstrates the superiority of the proposed method.
Keywords—synthetic aperture radar (SAR), automatic target
recognition (ATR), dominant scattering centers, 2D compressive
sensing (CS), 2D random projection, nearest neighbor classifier
(NNC)
I. INTRODUCTION
Feature extraction is an important process in synthetic
aperture radar (SAR) automatic target recognition (ATR)
system, which aims to reduce the dimension while keeping
the discriminative information of the original SAR images.
In order to achieve high recognition performance, the
extracted features must be stable and separable. In general,
feature extraction methods can be grouped into two
categories: linear and nonlinear methods. Two representative
linear methods are principal component analysis (PCA) [1]
and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) [1]. Nonlinear
methods include the kernel methods and the nonlinear
manifold learning methods. By using the kernel trick, the
nonlinear samples which are undivided on the low-
dimensional space are projected into higher or even infinite
dimensional space, and then features are extracted by the
linear methods. Typical kernel methods are kernel principal
component analysis (KPCA) [2] and kernel linear
discriminant analysis (KLDA) [3] which have been
demonstrated more competitive in SAR ATR than PCA and
LDA. Manifold learning [4] assumes that the high
dimensional data is embedded in a low dimensional manifold
thus providing an excellent tool for dimension reduction.
Various manifold learning algorithms [5] have been
proposed for feature extraction and applied to SAR ATR.
However, most of the abovementioned methods stack the 2D
/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE
images to vectors before feature extraction; such operation
may lose some intrinsic structure of the images as well as
increase the computational load. To avoid this operation,
several methods are proposed to directly work on the 2D
images for feature extraction such as two-dimensional
principal component analysis (2DPCA) [8][9] and two-
dimensional linear discriminant analysis (2DLDA) [10].
In this paper, we propose a novel feature extraction
method based on the theory of two dimensional compressive
sensing (2D CS) [11][12] with application to SAR ATR. To
begin with, the target in a SAR image is represented by
several dominant scattering centers (SCs) on it, thus
obtaining a sparse image containing only a few non-zero
elements. According to the theory of 2D CS, the sparse
image can be reconstructed by a low dimensional matrix.
Therefore, the low dimensional matrix can be used as the
feature for the original SAR image. In the recognition stage,
the Frobenius norm is employed as the distance measure for
the extracted 2D feature matrices and then the nearest
neighbor classifier (NNC) [13] is used for target
classification.
This paper is organized as follows. Section II introduces
the feature extraction using 2D random projection. In Section
III, the proposed feature is applied to target recognition. We
experimentally evaluate the proposed method in Section IV.
Conclusions are drawn in Section V.
II. FEATURE EXTRACTION
A. Dominant scattering area image
Generally, SAR sensors work at high frequencies. In this
region, the radar backscatter from an object is well-
approximated as the sum of responses from individual SCs
on the object [14]. As a result, SCs have been proposed as
important features for SAR ATR. In this paper, a dominant
SC is defined as a scattering source which makes relatively
strong reflections. A small number of pixels with relatively
high amplitudes are chosen as the dominant SCs. We call the
image containing only a few dominant SCs as ‘Dominant
Scattering Area (DSA) Image’ [15]. Obviously, the number
of selected SCs (denoted as SN) will influence the
constructed DSA image as shown in Fig.1. With a large SN,
more characteristics of the target can be maintained while
some of the selected SCs may be false alarms. The DSA
image at a very small SN only contains a few strong SCs thus
missing too many true SCs. Therefore, the selection of SN is
1223
 2017 11th European Conference on Antennas and Propagation (EUCAP)
an important work and we will choose it according to the
recognition performance, which will be stated in Section IV.
(a)200 (b) 150 (c) 100
(d) 50 (e) 20
Fig.1 DSA images under different SNs.
B. Feature construction using 2D random projection
Most projection schemes for feature extraction stack the
n n
2D image X  R 1 2 into a vector as x  vec(X ) . The
conversion, however, ignores the intrinsic structure of the
original 2D image. In addition, even for matrices with
moderate sizes, the constructed projection matrix is a high
dimensional one which leads to a high computational
complexity and a singular problem. To cope with these
drawbacks, the so-called 2D projection scheme is employed
to directly handle the 2D images, i.e. Y  AXBT , in which
m m
Y  R 1 2 is the low dimensional feature matrix,
m n m n
A  R 1 1 and B  R 2 2 are projection matrices where
m1  n1 , m2  n2 . The key problem in 2D projection is
the design of the projection matrices. For example, the
2DPCA and 2DLDA construct the projection matrices
according to the statistical characteristics of the training
samples.
As shown in Fig.1, the DSA images are sparse matrices
with only a few non-zero elements. However, they are still
high-dimensional images. In the CS theory framework, the
sparse signal can be reconstructed by a small number of
measurements with little distortion [16]. By extending the CS
theory to 2D space [11], the original sparse matrix can be
reconstructed by the low dimensional feature matrix
m m
Y  R 1 2 . Thus, the 2D CS theory provides a simple and
effective way to extract features from 2D sparse matrices
m n m n
[12]. By designing A  R 1 1 and B  R 2 2 as random
matrices, the feature extraction process can be depicted as
n n
Y  AXBT , where X  R 1 2 is a sparse matrix, meaning
the DSA image in this paper.
However, in order to guarantee the fidelity of the original
sparse matrix, the dimension of feature matrix Y , i.e. m1
and m2 , should be properly selected. According to [11],
some necessary conditions for the selection of m1 and m2
are as follows:
1224
X  spark (A)spark (B ) / 4
0
( 0 norm of each column of X )  spark (A) / 2
( 0 norm of each row of X )  spark (B ) / 2 (1)
In equation (1), X denotes the  0 norm of X
0
meaning the non-zero elements in X , the spark of a matrix
represents the minimal number of its columns which are
m n
linearly dependent. For the random matrices A  R 1 1 and
m2 n2
B R , there exist spark (A)  m1  1 and
spark (B )  m2  1 . We use 2D random projection to
extract feature from the DSA image and then reconstruct the
original sparse image by the 2D-LS0 [11]. Fig. 2 shows the
reconstructed results at different selections of m1 and m2
for the DSA image at SN=100 in Fig.1. It is clear shown that
the selection of m1  22 and m2  22 can well serve for
the sparse image reconstruction indicating that features
extracted at this selection can well maintain the properties of
the original sparse image. In this paper, the selection of
(m1, m2 ) for DSA images at SN=20,50,100,150,200 are
chosen as (6,6), (10,10), (15,15), (22,22) and (30,30)
respectively.
(a) m1  15 , m2  15 (b) m1  22 , m2  22
Fig.2 Reconstructions at different selections of m1 and m2 .
III. FEATURE EXTRACTION
In the recognition stage, the NNC is employed for target
classification. After the feature extraction, the original SAR
images are represented by low dimensional feature matrices.
The Frobenius norm is used to evaluate the distance between
two feature matrices in this paper. Denote the template
feature database as TY  Y1,Y2 , ,YN  and each
Yi (i  1, 2, , N ) is associated with a certain type of target

Yi . For the testing feature Y , the target type is determinate
by the following equation:

Yi  arg min Y Yi (2)
Yi TY F
 2017 11th European Conference on Antennas and Propagation (EUCAP)

To avoid comparing the testing feature Y with each 100

Yi (i  1, 2, , N ) in the template feature database. Pose 90

Recognition rate/%
estimation technique in [17] is adopted in this paper. The
80
azimuth of the testing image is estimated then the template
database selects the potential samples according to the 70
estimated azimuth. We assume the azimuth estimation error
is within 5°. The implementation of target recognition is 60

depicted in Fig.3.
50
20 50 100 150 200
SN
Fig.4 The recognition rate under depression angle variance versus SN.
As shown in Fig.4, the recognition rate varies with the
selection of SN. With SNs below 150, the recognition rate
experiences an increase from 71.23% to 98.75% with the
enlargement of SN. This is mainly because the DSA image
with a small number of dominant SCs will lose some
discriminative SCs. In addition, SCs on a target have
scattered fields of different intensities while keeping the
positions under depression angle variance. Therefore, more
dominant SCs are favored to keep the spatial information of
the target under this condition. However, when the SN
Fig.3 The implementation of target recognition.
changes from 150 to 200, there is a slight decrease of the
IV. EXPERIMENT recognition rate. The reason may be that the DSA image with
too many SCs may contain several false SCs thus impairing
A. Data preparation the performance.
Experiments are conducted on the MSTAR dataset to Table II lists the confusion matrix of the proposed
evaluate the performance of the proposed method. SAR method at SN=150. All the three targets can be correctly
images in the MSTAR dataset have a resolution of 0.3m× recognized with a recognition rate higher than 98% with an
0.3m with a size of 128 × 128 pixels. In this paper, target average of 98.75%.
images of BMP2 (containing three configuration variants:
Sn_9563, Sn_9566, Sn_c21), BTR70 (Sn_c71) and T72 TABLE II. CONFUSION MATRIX AT SN=150.
(containing three configuration variants: Sn_132, Sn_812,
Class Results
Sn_s7) at the depression angle of 17°and 15°are used. Pc (%)
BMP2 BTR70 T72
Table I lists the type and scale of each target. BMP2Sn_9563 194 0 1 99.49
BMP2Sn_9566 194 1 1 98.98
BMP2Sn_c21 194 0 2 98.98
TABLE I. TARGET IMAGES IN THE EXPERIMENT BTR70Sn_c71 2 193 1 98.47
Class T72Sn_132 1 2 193 98.47
17° 15°
T72Sn_812 2 1 192 98.46
BMP2Sn_9563 233 195 T72Sn_s7 1 2 188 98.43
BMP2Sn_9566 232 196 Average (%) 98.75
BMP2Sn_c21 233 196
BTR70Sn_c71 233 196 C. Configuration variance
T72Sn_132 232 196
T72Sn_812 231 195 To test the proposed method under configuration variance,
T72Sn_s7 228 191 the template and testing sets are designed as Table III.

B. Depression angle variance TABLE III. TEMPLATE AND TESTING SETS WITH CONFIGURATION
Firstly, images at 17° are employed as the template set VARIANCE.
while images at 15 ° are tested thus we can test the Class Size Depression angle
performance of the proposed method under depression angle BMP2Sn_c21 233 17°
variance. Template set
T72Sn_132 232 17°
BMP2Sn_9566 232 17°
BMP2Sn_9563 233 17°
Testing set T72Sn_812 231 17°
T72Sn_s7 228 17°
The recognition rate of the proposed method under
configuration variance is plotted in Fig.5. The recognition
rate peaks at 92.45% when SN equals 100. It is obvious that

1225
 2017 11th European Conference on Antennas and Propagation (EUCAP)

100
the configuration variance causes a bigger loss to the average
recognition rate than depression angle variance. The 90
configuration variants of a target can be seen as the change

Recognition rate/%
of several SCs of the target. For example, a T72 target with 80
an oil tank removed can be represented as the absence of the
SCs associated with the oil tank in the SAR image. Therefore, 70

the selection of dominant SCs in a given target is critical for

60
configuration recognition. The selected SCs should keep the
generality of the target while rejecting individual 50
20 50 100 150 200
characteristics of different configurations. According to the SN
result in Fig.5, the selection of SN=100 is the best choice for Fig. 6 The recognition rate under depression angle and configuration
configuration recognition. variances versus SN.
100 E. Comparison with other methods
90 The proposed method is compared with several SAR
ATR methods using other feature extraction methods,
Recognition rate/%

80 namely PCA [1] , KPCA [2] and 2DPCA [9]. We choose

70
60
50
20 50 100 150
SN
Fig. 5 The recognition rate under configuration variance versus SN.
D. Depression angle and configuration variances
We design the template and testing sets as Table IV to
test the proposed method under depression angle and
configuration variances. Fig.6 shows the average recognition
rate changing with the number of SN, the best performance is
achieved at SN=150 with the recognition rate of 91.43%.
According to the analysis in 4.1 and 4.2, under the condition
of depression angle and configuration variances, the selected
SCs should not only keep more spatial information of the
target but also reject more individuality between different
configurations. The experimental result demonstrates the
selection of SN=150 is a recommendable choice.
these methods for comparison because they are classical and
frequently-used feature extraction techniques in SAR ATR.
For consistency of comparison, all the extracted features are
classified by the NNC. Table V lists the highest recognition
200
rate and corresponding feature dimensions of different these
methods under different conditions. The proposed method
achieves the highest recognition rate among all the methods.
The PCA and KPCA extract feature from the vectorization
expressions of the original images, their recognition rates are
relative than 2D methods. Although the dimensions of the
extracted feature vectors are much lower than the 2D
methods, the time consumption of stacking images to vectors
and the computational load of calculation high dimensional
covariance matrix must be considered. The traditional
2DPCA [8] compresses the image only in one direction
(often in the row direction) thus resulting in a high
dimensional feature vector. Ref.[9] extends the 2DPCA to
two directions and applied it to SAR ATR. The 2DPCA
achieves a lower recognition rate than the proposed method
at a similar feature dimension.

TABLE V. PERFORMANCE COMPARISON WITH OTHER METHODS

TABLE IV. TEMPLATE AND TESTING SETS WITH DEPRESSION ANGLE
AND CONFIGURATION VARIANCES. The highest recognition rate (%)
Class Size Depression angle
Depression Configuration Depression angle
BMP2Sn_c21 233 17° angle and configuration
Template set
T72Sn_132 232 17° Proposed 98.75 (30×30) 92.45 (22×22) 91.43 (30×30)
method
BMP2Sn_9566 196 15°
PCA[1] 95.22 (150) 89.36 (150) 87.56 (150)
BMP2Sn_9563 196 15° KPCA[2] 96.12 (120) 90.43 (120) 88.72 (120)
Testing set T72Sn_812 195 15° 2DPCA[9] 97.56 (20×20) 91.78 (20×20) 90.24 (20×20)
T72Sn_s7 191 15° V. CONCLUSION
This paper proposes a new method for SAR ATR. The
DSA image comprised by several dominant SCs is used to
represent original SAR image. A 2D random projection is
then employed for feature extraction from the sparse DSA
images based on the theory of 2D CS. The low-dimensional
2D feature matrix is classified by the NNC to determine the
target type. The proposed method is tested under depression
angle variance, configuration variance as well as the
depression angle and configuration variances. The
experimental results demonstrate the validity and robustness
of the proposed method.

1226
 2017 11th European Conference on Antennas and Propagation (EUCAP)
REFERENCES
[1] A.K. Mishra, “Validation of PCA and LDA for SAR ATR,” in Proc.
IEEE TENCON, pp.1-6, 2008.
[2] A.K. Mishra and Tshiamo Motaung, “Application of linear and
nonlinear PCA to SAR ATR,” in Proc. 25th International Conference
on Radioelektronika, pp.349-354, 2015.
[3] Ping Han, Renbiao Wu, Yunhong Wang and Zhaohua Wang “An
efficient SAR ATR approach,” in Proc.ICASSP 2003, vol.2, pp.429-
432, 2003.
[4] H. S. Seung and D. D. Lee, “The manifold ways of perception,”
Science, vol. 290, pp. 2268–2269, 2000.
[5] Shouhei Ohno, Shouhei Kidera, Tetsuo, “Efficient SOM-based ATR
method for SAR imagery with azimuth angular variation,” IEEE
Geosciences and Remote Sensing Letters, vol.11, pp.1901-1905, 2014.
[6] Xian Liu, Yulin Huang, Jifang Pei and Jianyu Yang, “Sample
discriminant analysis for SAR ATR,” IEEE Geosciences and Remote
Sensing Letters, vol.11, pp.2120-2124, 2014
[7] Yulin Huang, Jifang Pei, Jianyu Yang, Bing Wang and Xian Liu,
“Neighborhood geometric center scaling embedding for SAR ATR,”
IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems, vol.5,
pp.180-192, 2014.
[8] Jian Yang, David Zhang, Alejandro F. Frangi, and Jing-yu Yang,
“Two-dimensional PCA: A new approach to appearance-based face
representation and recognition,” IEEE Transaction on Pattern
Analysis and Machine Learning, vol.26, pp.131-137, 2004.
1227
[9] A.K. Mishra, “Investigation of 1D and 2D PCA for SAR ATR,” in
Proc. AEMC, pp.1-4, 2009.
[10] Li, M., Yuan, B, “2D-LDA: a statistical linear discriminant analysis
for image matrix,” Pattern Recognition Letters, vol.26, pp.527-532,
2005.
[11] Aboozar Ghaffari, Massoud Babaie-Zadeh and Christian Jutten,
“Sparse decomposition of two dimensional signals,” in Proc. ICASSP
2009, pp.3157-3160, 2009.
[12] Armin Eftekhari, Hamid Abrishami Moghaddam and Massound
Babaie-Zadeh, “Two dimensional compressive classifier for sparse
images,” in Proc. 16th ICIP, pp.2137-2140, 2009.
[13] T.M.Cover and P.E.Hart, “Nearest neighbor pattern classification,”
IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, vol.IT-13, pp.21-27, 1967.
[14] M. J. Gerry, L. C. Potter, I. J. Gupta, “A Parametric Model for
Synthetic Aperture Radar Measurements,” IEEE Transactions on
Antennas and Propagation, vol.47, pp.1179-1188, 1999.
[15] Seung Ho Doo, Graeme Smith and Chris Baker, “Reliable target
feature extraction and classification using potential target
information”, in Proc. RadarCon, pp.0628-0633, 2015.
[16] D.L.Donoho, “Compressed sensing,” IEEE Transactions on
Information Theory, vol.52, pp.1289-1306, 2006.
[17] Yijun Sun, Zhipeng Liu, Sinisa Todorovic and Jian Li. “Adaptive
boosting for SAR automatic target recognition,” IEEE Transactions
on Aerospace and Electronic Systems, vol.43, pp.112-125, 2007.