Scattering Target Identification Based on Radial Basis Function Artificial Neural Networks in the Presence of Non-Stationary Noise

Abstract

The paper deals with the radar target discrimination problem performed on complex radar images. The approach based on radial basis function (RBF) artificial neural network (ANN) is proposed for the identification of point scatterers placed within a radar image. The renewed concept of simple adaptive units as the foundation for network assembling allows one to design an ANN-based feature extraction scheme for the two-dimensional signal processing. It was shown that ANN implementing RBF neural processing units could be applied for the identification of radar targets described by the set of separated scatterers, even in cases where the relative distance between the scatterers is comparable to or less than the effective width of each scatterer. The obtained results indicate a high accuracy estimation of separate scatterer centers in the presence of noise which is not limited to the stationary case but supposed to be cyclostationary. It was also shown that the parameters describing the coordinates of scattering centers could be successfully extracted from the trained ANN after about one hundred epochs spent on ANN training process, which is carried out by means of modified gradient descent method. The main result is to demonstrate the possibility of using neural networks to automatically analyze radar images, which is an integral part of a set of tasks that form the target recognition problem. The proposed algorithm implements an approach of identification systems made using a neural network training procedures.