Recent years have witnessed an ever-mounting interest in the research of sparse representation. The framework, Sparse Representation-based Classification (SRC), has been widely applied as a classifier in numerous domains, among which Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) target recognition is really challenging because it still is an open problem to interpreting the SAR image. In this paper, SRC is utilized to classify a 10-class moving and stationary target acquisition and recognition (MSTAR) target, which is a standard SAR data set. Before the classification, the sizes of the images need to be normalized to maintain the useful information, target and shadow, and to suppress the speckle noise. Specifically, a preprocessing method is recommended to extract the feature vectors of the image, and the feature vectors of the test samples can be represented by the sparse linear combination of basis vectors generated by the feature vectors of the training samples. Then the sparse representation is solved by l 1 -norm minimization. Finally, the identities of the test samples are inferred by the reconstructive errors calculated through the sparse coefficient. Experimental results demonstrate the good performance of SRC. Additionally, the average recognition rate under different feature spaces and the recognition rate of each target are discussed.

Achieving accurate clock synchronization may not be feasible for distributed multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar systems with non-ideal clocks of the sensors. In this paper, the problem of target localization and clock synchronization in distributed MIMO radar systems in presence of time synchronization errors is addressed by utilizing time delay measurements. Firstly, the necessity to consider time synchronization errors when locating a target is illustrated by analyzing the increase in Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) of the target position due to the time synchronization error. Then, a self-synchronized localization framework based on the hybrid maximum likelihood and maximum a posteriori estimator is proposed to estimate the target position and time synchronization error sequentially. Specifically, a method based on the levenberg marquardt algorithm and an analytical solution are developed respectively to estimate the target position, and a combination strategy is recommended further based on the two methods to achieve a more accurate target position estimate. The time synchronization error is figured out then by utilizing the target position estimate. Meanwhile, the closed-form solution of estimating the target position and time synchronization error is analytically proved to be approximately unbiased and can attain the CRLB under weak noise conditions. It is demonstrated through numerical simulations that the combination strategy has better estimation performance than the two methods. Simultaneously, simulation results show that the proposed self-synchronized localization method outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms in the target position and time synchronization error estimation accuracy.

In general, target localization in distributed multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar systems requires synchronization among the sensors, which may not be feasible when the sensors are widely separated. In this paper, the target localization problem is addressed under asynchronous distributed MIMO radar systems in the presence of clock and frequency offsets with the aid of a cooperative target, whose position and velocity are known with measurement errors. Specifically, the influence of the cooperative target position and velocity errors on the unknown target localization accuracy is analyzed through the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) derivation firstly. Then two methods, namely, the offset estimation based localization method and the offset elimination based localization method, are proposed to estimate the unknown target location. The former estimates the clock and frequency offsets firstly and then locates the unknown target based on the offset estimates, and the latter achieves the unknown target location estimate based on the differential measurements of the two targets. Through the theoretical derivation and numerical simulations, the two proposed methods are demonstrated to be approximately unbiased and can attain the CRLB under mild noise. Moreover, the simulation results show that the proposed methods enjoy higher localization accuracy than the state-of-the-art algorithms.

In this paper, a novel algebraic closed-form method is proposed to estimate the position and velocity of a moving target in distributed multiple-input multiple-output radar systems with erroneous sensor locations by utilizing time delay and Doppler shift measurements. Unlike the existing methods that introduce nuisance parameters to build the pseudo-linear equations, the proposed method uses the singular value decomposition approach to establish new linear equations with regard to the target location with no nuisance parameters, and then derives a weighted least-squares (WLS) solution. To further improve the localization accuracy, the solution is refined through estimating the error by another WLS estimator. Based on the theoretical derivation and numerical simulations, the proposed estimator is demonstrated to be approximately unbiased and can attain the CRLB under small noise conditions. Moreover, the simulation results show that the proposed method achieves better target location accuracy than the state-of-the-art algorithms.

This paper investigates the multi-target detection and localization problem for distributed multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar. We first derive the optimal approach of this issue in the high-dimensional space according to the generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) and the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). Moreover, the theoretical multi-target localization accuracy under the considered discrete time signal model is analyzed by invoking the Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB) and the sampling lower bound (SLB). To deal with the high complexity problem of the optimal solution, an energy-guided framework including two modules is proposed to detect and locate multiple targets. In the first module, the energy accumulation approach based on the GLRT is employed for multi-target detection, and a fast energy accumulation strategy in terms of the far-field case is developed to improve the computational efficiency. In the second module, an innovative iterative similarity evaluation (ISE) method is designed to determine the positions of multiple targets by exploiting the relationship between the energy accumulation characteristics and the multi-target existence conditions. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is verified via extensive simulations in both far-field and near-field cases.

Video satellites can stare at target areas on the Earth’s surface to obtain high-temporal-resolution remote sensing videos, which make it possible to track objects in satellite videos. However, it should be noted that the object size in satellite videos is usually small and has less textural property, and the moving objects in satellite videos are easily occluded, which puts forward higher requirements for the tracker. In order to solve the above problems, consider that the remote sensing image contains rich road information, which can be used to constrain the trajectory of the object in a satellite video, this paper proposes an improved Kernel Correlation Filter (KCF) assisted by road information to track small objects, especially when the object is occluded. Specifically, the contributions of this paper are as follows: First, the tracking confidence module is reconstructed, which integrates the peak response and the average peak correlation energy of the response map to more accurately judge whether the object is occluded. Then, an adaptive Kalman filter is designed to adaptively adjust the parameters of the Kalman filter according to the motion state of the object, which improves the robustness of tracking and reduces the tracking drift after the object is occluded. Last but not least, an object tracking strategy assisted by road information is recommended, which searches for objects with road information as constraints, to locate objects more accurately. After the above improvements, compared with the KCF tracker, our method improves the tracking precision by 35.9% and the tracking success rate by 18.1% with the tracking rate at a speed of 300 frames per second, which meets the real-time requirements.