SAR target recognition based on improved joint sparse representation

Jian Cheng, Lan Li, Hongsheng Li, Feng Wang

Abstract: In this paper, a SAR target recognition method is proposed based on the improved joint sparse representation (IJSR) model. The IJSR model can effectively combine multiple-view SAR images from the same physical target to improve the recognition performance. The classification process contains two stages. Convex relaxation is used to obtain support sample candidates with the ℓ1-norm minimization in the first stage. The low-rank matrix recovery strategy is introduced to explore the final support samples and its corresponding sparse representation coefficient matrix in the second stage. Finally, with the minimal reconstruction residual strategy, we can make the SAR target classification. The experimental results on the MSTAR database show the recognition performance outperforms state-of-the-art methods, such as the joint sparse representation classification (JSRC) method and the sparse representation classification (SRC) method.