SAR image target recognition via Complementary Spatial Pyramid Coding

Many works have been recently presented to extract efficient features for automatic target recognition of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. However, they are limited in the discriminative ability of similar targets and robustness to the remarkable speckle noises and background clutters existed in images. In this paper, we propose a Complementary Spatial Pyramid Coding (CSPC) approach in the framework of Spatial Pyramid Matching (SPM). Both the coding coefficients and coding residuals are explored to develop more discriminative and robust features for representing SAR images. Multiple codebooks are first built from some training example images, where each codebook is formulated by local features of a certain class of samples. Then multiple sparse coding models are developed to derive features of a target under these codebooks. Additionally, these coding residuals are further sparsely encoded in the same way to that of local features. Finally, the encoded local features and the residual features are pooled according to spatial pyramid respectively, then concatenated to form the complementary features for the subsequent classification. The experiments on Moving and Stationary Target Acquisition and Recognition (MSTAR) public database verify the superior performance of the proposed method to some related approaches.