Automatic target recognition using group-structured sparse representation

Abstract

Sparse representation classification method has been increasingly used in the fields of computer vision and pattern analysis, due to its high recognition rate, little dependence on the features, robustness to corruption and occlusion, and etc. However, most of these existing methods aim to find the sparsest representations of the test sample y in an overcomplete dictionary, which do not particularly consider the relevant structure between the atoms in the dictionary. Moreover, sufficient training samples are always required by the sparse representation method for effective recognition. In this paper we formulate the classification as a group-structured sparse representation problem using a sparsity-inducing norm minimization optimization and propose a novel sparse representation-based automatic target recognition (ATR) framework for the practical applications in which the training samples are drawn from the simulation models of real targets. The experimental results show that the proposed approach improves the recognition rate of standard sparse models, and our system can effectively and efficiently recognize targets under real environments, especially, where the good characteristics of the sparse representation based classification method are kept.