Aircraft identification by unions of ISAR images

We offer an algorithm that can identify aircraft categories from Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar (ISAR) images that use both the radar reflection pulse shape, which includes the duration or size of the radar pulse that is reflected, and the Doppler shifts of different parts of the aircraft caused by rotational motions of the aircraft as it maneuvers. We investigated the practicality of determining which of seven different aircraft categories a radar return indicates. The object of this research is to very quickly tell from an ISAR return how an aircraft compares to the seven different categories where the aircraft is in any position of a prescribed holding pattern. We propose a new method in which we compare each ISAR image to unions of images of the different aircraft categories. This method gave us results that are superior to the results we obtained in [8].