Author Description

This research details the effect of spatial resolution on target discrimination in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images. Multiple SAR image chips containing targets and non-targets are used to test a baseline Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) system with reduced spatial resolution obtained by lowering the pixel count or synthesizing a degraded image. The pixel count is lowered by averaging groups of adjoining pixels to form a new single value. The degraded image is synthesized by low-pass filtering the image frequency space and then lowering the pixel count. A two parameter Constant False Alarm Rate (CFAR) detector is tested, and three different types of feature spaces; size, contrast, and texture; are used to trian a linear classifier. The results are scored using the Area Under the Receiver Operator Characteristic (AUROC) curve.