Performance of the MACH filter and DCCF algorithms in the presence of data compression

The impact of wavelet based compression on automatic target recognition (ATR) is investigated by applying wavelet compression to test scenes. The correlation algorithms known as maximum average correlation height (MACH) filter and the distance classifier correlation (DCCF) filter are used for ATR. The impact of compressing the correlation filters is also studied. The wavelet compression algorithm makes use of a progressive technique of embedded zerotree wavelet coding followed by adaptive arithmetic coding. Two target data sets are used for testing and training in this study. The first is composed of infrared (IR) images of a T72 tank and BMP armored personnel carrier. The second is a set of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) targets from the publicly released Moving and Stationary Target Acquisition and Recognition (MSTAR) database.