Effect of SAR resolution on target identification

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) sensors are being developed with better resolution to improve target identification, but this improvement has a significant cost. Furthermore, higher resolution corresponds to more pixels per image and, consequently, more data to process. Here, the effect of resolution on a many class target identification problem is determined using high resolution SAR data with artificially reduced resolution, a Mean-Squared Error (MSE) criterion, and template matching. It is found each increase in resolution by a factor of two increases the average MSE between a target and possible confusers by five to ten percent. Interpolating SAR images in the spatial domain to obtain artificially higher resolution images results in an average MSE that is actually much worse than the original SAR images. Increasing resolution significantly improves target identification performance while interpolating low- resolution images degrades target identification performance.