Dynamic aircraft identification using HRRP under attitude perturbation interference

The Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) with target High-Resolution Range Profile (HRRP) is of great research and application significance. Environmental interferences reflect close relevance with target HRRP imaging quality as well as classification performance. The dynamic target attitude perturbation is considered as one of the dominant interference factors. This paper studies its impact on aircraft HRRP through simulation and statistical analysis. HRRP confidence zone and similarity concepts are proposed as qualitative and quantitative tools for HRRP variation description under attitude perturbation. Extracted HRRP variation features provide a novel solution to overcome attitude perturbation interference in target classification while maintaining the accuracy. Classification evaluations over three aircraft models in accuracy and efficiency consolidate the proposed classification method which better suits the practical classification scenario.