The Effect of Synthetic Aperture Radar Image Resolution on Target Discrimination

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.