New experiments in inverse synthetic aperture radar image exploitation for maritime surveillance

This paper provides a summary of recent experimental study in using signatures obtained via polarimetric inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) for classification of small boats in littoral environments. First step in discerning the intention of any small boat is to classify and fingerprint it so it can be observed over an extended period of time. Currently, ISAR techniques are used for large ship classification. Large ships tend to have a rich set of discernible features making classification straightforward. However, small boats rarely have a rich set of discernible features, and are more vulnerable to motion-based range migration that leads to severe signature blurring, thus making classification more challenging. The emphasis of this paper is on the development and use of several enhancement methods for polarimetric ISAR imagery of small boats followed by a target classification study whereby the enhanced signatures of two boats were used to extract several separability metrics to ascertain the effectiveness of these distance measure for target classification.