Clustering-Based Geometrical Structure Retrieval of Man-Made Target in SAR Images

Abstract

In synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, scattering centers (SCs) from the same geometric structure of the man-made target usually have the same scattering type and similar coordinates. Inspired by this observation, a novel clustering-based geometrical structure retrieval (C-GSR) method is proposed to estimate the geometrical structure of targets by clustering SCs according to their types and coordinates. The C-GSR method considers each peak in a SAR image as a single SC and extracts both frequency and polarization features for classification. Then, SCs are efficiently clustered using the density-distance-based clustering algorithm. Finally, the geometrical structure corresponding to each canonical scatterer can be retrieved by computing the coordinates of SCs associated with the corresponding cluster. Experimental results have demonstrated the feasibility and accuracy of the proposed C-GSR method.