Problem set guidelines to facilitate ATR research, development, and performance assessments

In November of 2000, the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Science and Technology Sensor Systems (DUSD (S&T/SS)) chartered the ATR Working Group (ATRWG) to develop guidelines for sanctioned Problem Sets. Such Problem Sets are intended for development and test of ATR algorithms and contain comprehensive documentation of the data in them. A problem set provides a consistent basis to examine ATR performance and growth. Problem Sets will, in general, serve multiple purposes. First, they will enable informed decisions by government agencies sponsoring ATR development and transition. Problem Sets standardize the testing and evaluation process, resulting in consistent assessment of ATR performance. Second, they will measure and guide ATR development progress within this standardized framework. Finally, they quantify the state of the art for the community. Problem Sets provide clearly defined operating condition coverage. This encourages ATR developers to consider these critical challenges and allows evaluators to assess over them. Thus the widely distributed development and self-test portions, along with a disciplined methodology documented within the Problem Set, permit ATR developers to address critical issues and describe their accomplishments, while the sequestered portion permits government assessment of state-of-the-art and of transition readiness. This paper discusses the elements of an ATR problem set as a package of data and information that presents a standardized ATR challenge relevant to one or more scenarios. The package includes training and test data containing targets and clutter, truth information, required experiments, and a standardized analytical methodology to assess performance.

[1]  Timothy D. Ross,et al.  SAR ATR: so what's the problem? An MSTAR perspective , 1999, Defense, Security, and Sensing.

[2]  Timothy D. Ross Confidence intervals for ATR performance metrics , 2001, SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing.