Target recognition in SAR images using radial Chebyshev moments

Abstract

In this study, a new algorithm for classification of ground vehicles from standard synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is proposed. Radial Chebyshev moment (RCM) is a discrete orthogonal moment that has distinctive advantages over other moments for feature extraction. Unlike invariant moments, its orthogonal basis leads to having minimum information redundancy, and its discrete characteristics explore some benefits over Zernike moments (ZM) due to having no numerical errors and no computational complexity owing to normalization. In this context, we propose to use RCM as the feature extraction mechanism on the segmented image and to compare results of the fused images with both Zernike and radial Chebyshev moments. Firstly, by applying different threshold target and shadow parts of each SAR images are extracted separately. Then, segmented images are fused based on the combination of the extracted segmented region, segmented boundary and segmented texture. Experimental results will verify that accuracy of RCM, which improves significantly over the ZM. Ten percent improvement in the accuracy is obtained by using RCM and fusion of segmented target and shadow parts. Furthermore, feature fusion improves the total accuracy of the classification as high as 6%.