268 IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING LETTERS, VOL. 10, NO.

2, MARCH 2013
SAR Target Conguration Recognition Using
Locality Preserving Property and
Gaussian Mixture Distribution
Ming Liu, Yan Wu, Peng Zhang, Qiang Zhang, Yanxin Li, and Ming Li
AbstractFeature extraction is the key step of synthetic aper-
ture radar (SAR) target conguration recognition. A statistical
model embedding the locality preserving property is presented
to extract the maximum amount of desired information from the
data, which is of crucial help to recognition. The noise, or error,
of the SAR image samples is described by a Gaussian mixture
distribution, and the locality preserving property is embedded
into the statistical model to focus on the problem of conguration
recognition. Along with the extraction of the information of inter-
est through the use of the statistical model, also, the preservation of
the local structure of the data set is achieved. Parameter estimation
is implemented through the expectationmaximization algorithm.
Experimental results on the Moving and Stationary Target Acqui-
sition and Recognition data set validate the effectiveness of the
proposed method. SARtarget conguration recognition is realized
with satisfactory accuracy.
Index TermsConguration recognition, Gaussian mixture
distribution, locality preserving property, synthetic aperture radar
(SAR) image.
I. INTRODUCTION
T
HE AIM of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) target congu-
ration recognition is to nd the probable target in the SAR
scene and then recognize the conguration of the found target.
The target conguration indicates how the target is deployed,
and targets of the same type with different congurations
are called variants [1]. Traditional algorithms for SAR target
recognition focus on the recognition of target types, which
means that targets with different congurations of the same
type are regarded as the same [2][5]. However, the recognition
of the target conguration is of signicance to a number of
application areas, such as detailed information capturing of
interested targets and battleeld perception.
Manuscript received January 17, 2012; revised April 6, 2012; accepted
April 30, 2012. Date of publication July 6, 2012; date of current version
October 22, 2012. This work was supported in part by the National Natural
Science Foundation of China under Grant 60872137, by the National Defense
Foundation of China under Grant 9140C0103071003, by the Aviation Sci-
ence Foundation of China under Grant 2011018106, and by the Specialized
Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education under Grant
20110203110001.
M. Liu, Y. Wu, Q. Zhang, and Y. Li are with the School of Electronic
Engineering, Xidian University, Xian 710071, China (e-mail: liuming0910@
gmail.com; ywu@mail.xidian.edu.cn; qzhang@mail.xidian.edu.cn;
liyanxin860@163.com).
P. Zhang and M. Li are with the National Key Laboratory of Radar Signal
Processing, Xidian University, Xian 710071, China (e-mail: zhangpeng4415@
hotmail.com; liming@xidian.edu.cn).
Color versions of one or more of the gures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identier 10.1109/LGRS.2012.2198610
The key step of a recognition algorithm lies in feature ex-
traction, which not only realizes the dimensionality reduction
of the data set but also preserves the information useful for
recognition of the samples as much as possible. An algorithm
is proposed for target conguration recognition using locality
preserving property and Gaussian mixture distribution, which
extracts the maximum desired information through a statistical
model. Gaussian mixture distribution has good adaptability, and
its parameter estimation is relatively easy. It can approximate
any distribution smoothly in theory, which has been widely
applied to many SAR image processing areas like segmentation
and classication [6][8]. Considering the existence of the
speckle noise in SAR images and the residual error of the
model, a mixture of Gaussian distributions is used to describe
the statistical property of the unwanted component of SAR
images. The locality preserving property can ensure that the
same conguration samples that are close to each other in
the high-dimension space are still close in the low-dimension
space. To preserve the local structure of the samples of the same
conguration, the locality preserving property is embedded into
the statistical model, which is of importance to SAR target
conguration recognition.
The main steps of the proposed recognition algorithm is
shown in Fig. 1. In the rst step, the images are preprocessed
to enhance the recognition performance [3], [4]; in the second
step, the projection matrix is obtained by using the Gaussian
mixture distribution statistical model embedding the locality
preserving property, and the SAR image to be recognized is
projected by the projection matrix, and parameter estimation is
implemented through the expectation maximization (EM) algo-
rithm [9][11]; in the last step, a nearest neighbor classier [12]
is applied to identify the target conguration. The effectiveness
of the proposed algorithm is veried with experimental results,
and the comparisons with other algorithms further prove the
advantages of the proposed one.
II. SAR TARGET CONFIGURATION
RECOGNITION ALGORITHM
As mentioned earlier, effective feature extraction is the
precondition of accurate recognition. For a given SAR im-
age sample y
i
(i = 1, 2, . . . , N), N is the number of the
SAR images which are used as the training data, and we
have [13]
y
i
= Wx
i
+m+n
i
(1)
1545-598X/$31.00 2012 IEEE
LIU et al.: SAR TARGET CONFIGURATION RECOGNITION 269
Fig. 1. Flow diagram of the proposed algorithm.
where W is the projection matrix and x
i
(i = 1, 2, . . . , N) is
the reduced-dimensionality representation of y
i
. mis the mean
of y, y = {y
1
, y
2
, . . . , y
N
} is the original data set, and n
i
is
the corresponding noise, or error. As can be seen, the original
sample y
i
consists of both the useful component x
i
and the
unwanted component n
i
. The essential of feature extraction is
to preserve the useful information as much as possible, which
is helpful for recognition. How to achieve the elimination of
the inuence of n, n = {n
1
, n
2
, . . . , n
N
}, and the preservation
of the desired x, x = {x
1
, x
2
, . . . , x
N
}, is the very point that
feature extraction focuses on.
In the view of statistic, the objective function can be ex-
pressed as
arg
W
max p(x|y). (2)
The marginal distribution p(y) does not give a direct in-
uence to the objective function, and through the Bayesian
equation p(x|y) = p(x)p(y|x)/p(y), we can get
p(x|y) p(x)p(y|x). (3)
Thus, the objective function in (2) can be updated as
arg
W
max [p(x)p(y|x)] = arg
W
max p(y, x). (4)
A. Gaussian Mixture Distribution for the Likelihood Function
Taking the special statistical property of SAR images into
consideration, we describe the error (consists of the speckle
noise caused by SAR imaging and the residual error of the
model) by Gaussian mixture distribution, which can approxi-
mate any distribution smoothly in theory [6]. Utilizing (1), the
likelihood function is given as
p(y
i
|x
i
) =
C

c=1
p(c)p(y
i
|x
i
, c) (5)
where C is the number of Gaussian distributions, p(y
i
|x
i
, c)
N(Wx
i
+m+
c
,
2
c
),
c
and
2
c
are the corresponding
mean and variance of n
i
, respectively, p(c) is the weight of the
cth part (c = 1, 2, . . . , C), and we have

C
c=1
p(c) = 1.
Substituting p(y
i
|x
i
, c) into (5), the likelihood function is
shown as
p(y
i
|x
i
)=
C

c=1
p(c)
_
1
2
2
c
_D
2
exp
_
(y
i
Wx
i
m
c
)
T
(y
i
Wx
i
m
c
)
2
2
c
_
(6)
where D is the dimensionality of the original samples and the
symbol
T
represents the transpose of matrix.
B. Locality Preserving Property Embedded Into the Prior
As to the prior p(x) in (4), it is regarded as p(x)
N(0, I) [11], and I is an identity matrix
p(x) =p(x
1
, x
2
, . . . , x
N
) =
N

i=1
p(x
i
)
=
N

i=1
_
1
2
_d
2
exp
_

1
2
x
T
i
x
i
_
=
_
1
2
_Nd
2
exp
_

1
2
tr(x
T
x)
_
(7)
where d is the dimensionality of x and tr() represents the trace
of matrix.
In order to preserve the local structure of the data that is
useful for conguration recognition, here, p(x) is modied as
p(x) =p(x
1
, x
2
, . . . , x
N
) =
N

i=1
p(x
i
)
=
_
1
2
_Nd
2
exp

1
2
N

i,j=1
(x
i
x
j
)
T
S
ij
(x
i
x
j
)

=
_
1
2
_Nd
2
exp
_
tr(xLx
T
)

(8)
where L = HS is the Laplacian matrix, H is a diagonal
matrix whose entries H
ii
=

j
S
ij
(or H
ii
=

i
S
ij
, since
S is symmetric) are column sums of S, and S is the afnity
matrix that reects the similarity between any two samples. It
is constructed as
S
ij
=
_
exp
_

y
i
y
j

2
t
_
y
i
, y
j
belong to the same class
0 y
i
, y
j
belong to different classes
(9)
where t is a constant.
Here, we take a close look at (8). The physical implication
can be seen in this way: Provided that the samples y
i
and
y
j
are close, (8) guarantees that the closer x
i
and x
j
are,
the larger p(x) will be, and vice versa. In other words, the
samples that are close in the high-dimension space are still
close in the low-dimension space through the construction of
the prior given by (8). Hence, the local structure of the data set
has been preserved, which is just as what is discussed in [14]
named locality preserving projection (LPP), or better, we have
fused the objective function presented in [14] into the prior. In
270 IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING LETTERS, VOL. 10, NO. 2, MARCH 2013
addition, as can be seen from (9), the closer y
i
and y
j
are,
the bigger S
ij
will be. Since we wish p(x) to be as large as
possible demanded by (4), when S
ij
is big implying that y
i
and
y
j
are close to each other, to be in accordance with the objective
function, the value of (x
i
x
j
)
2
has to be smaller. It means that
x
i
and x
j
should be even closer after dimensionality reduction,
which is just what we expect.
Note that the matrix S used here is different from that in
[14]. The S constructed here establishes relationships among
all the samples that belong to the same class, while weights of
the samples that belong to different classes are all set to zero.
The global topological structure of the data is preserved by this
improvement. Due to the full use of the given labels, both the
local and global topological properties of the data are retained.
C. Parameter Estimation Using EM Algorithm
The objective function expressed by (4) can move to
arg
W
max p(y, x) arg
W
max [ln p(y, x)]
= arg
W
max
N

i=1
ln [p(y
i
, x
i
)] . (10)
In this part, we come to the solution of the parameters
using the EM algorithm [9][11]. We note that P
ic
(missing
data in this situation) denotes indicator variable labels whose
model is responsible for generating n
i
, and we can derive an
EM algorithm by considering the corresponding log-likelihood
function of the complete data which takes the form
L =
C

c=1
N

i=1
P
ic
ln [p(c)p(y
i
, x
i
|c)] . (11)
In the expectation step, taking the expectation of L with
respect to the posterior distributions and neglecting the constant
parameters that do not give an inuence to the results, we have
=
C

c=1
N

i=1
P
ic
_
ln p(c)
D
2
ln
2
c

1
2
2
c
y
i
Wx
i
m
c

1
2
N

j=1
(x
i
x
j
)
T
S
ij
(x
i
x
j
)
_
(12)
where P
ic
=(p(n
i
|c)p(c)/

C
c=1
p(n
i
|c)p(c))=(p(n
i
|c)p(c)/
p(n
i
)) is the posterior responsibility of component c for gen-
erating n
i
, p(n
i
|c) N(
c
,
2
c
).
Then, we calculate the expectation of x through the deriva-
tive of the function shown in (12)
x
i
=
_
C

c=1
P
ic
_
1

2
c
W
T
W+ (H
ii
1)
_
_
1

_
C

c=1
P
ic
_
1

2
c
W
T
(y
i
m
c
) +
0
_
_
(13)
where
0
=

N
j=1,j=i
x
j
S
ij
.
TABLE I
CONFIGURATIONS AND SIZES OF THE TRAINING AND TESTING DATA SETS
In the maximization step, is maximized with respect to
c
,

2
c
, and W to get the updated values with the newly obtained
x. As to p(c), we can take advantage of the Lagrange multiplier
; the new value of p(c) can be obtained through maximizing
the following equation:
+
_
1
C

c=1
p(c)
_
. (14)
The newly obtained parameters are
p(c) =
1
N
N

i=1
P
ic

c
=
1
N

i=1
P
ic
N

i=1
P
ic
(y
i
Wx
i
m)

2
c
=
1
D
N

i=1
P
ic
N

i=1
P
ic
y
i
Wx
i
m
c

2
W =
_
C

c=1
N

i=1
P
ic
_
1

2
c
(y
i
m
c
)x
T
i
_
_

_
C

c=1
N

i=1
P
ic
_
1

2
c
x
i
x
T
i
_
_
1

. (15)
The algorithm iterates these two steps until convergence.
Hereto, the parameters are obtained, which are ready for
identication of the target conguration through the use of a
nearest neighbor classier [12].
III. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS AND ANALYSIS
Experimental results on the Moving and Stationary Target
Acquisition and Recognition database supported by the
Defense Advanced Resarch Projects Agency/Air Force
Research Laboratory of the U.S. [1] verify the effectiveness
of the proposed algorithm. The armored personnel carrier
BMP2 consists of three different congurations, which are
sn-9563, sn-9566, and sn-c21; the congurations of the main
battle tank T72 are sn-132, sn-812, and sn-s7; and the armored
personnel carrier BTR70 is with only one conguration sn-c71.
The SAR images obtained with the depression angle 17

are
LIU et al.: SAR TARGET CONFIGURATION RECOGNITION 271
TABLE II
PERFORMANCE OF TARGET-TYPE RECOGNITION UNDER DIFFERENT ALGORITHMS
Fig. 2. Recognition rate of each conguration versus dimensionality.
TABLE III
PERFORMANCE OF TARGET CONFIGURATION RECOGNITION UNDER DIFFERENT ALGORITHMS
used as the training data set, and the SAR images obtained
with the depression angle 15

are used as the testing data set

recommended by the workgroup [1]. All the images are 128
128 pixels, and the aspect angles of the vehicles lie between
0

and 360

. The congurations and sizes of the training and

testing data sets are given in Table I.
To validate the advantage of the proposed algorithm, the
LPP-based algorithm [14] and the principal component analysis
(PCA)-based algorithm are taken as comparisons. First, the
redundant background is excluded to get a 48 48 pixel
subimage from the center of each image, and the amplitude of
the subimage is normalized subsequently.
In the rst instance, we focus on the recognition of the
target type as the existing algorithms [2][5]; the results under
different algorithms are shown in Table II. It can be seen that the
recognition rate of the proposed algorithm is the best for each
type; ideal 100% accuracy can be obtained for the type BTR70
with only one conguration. However, the advantage is not
explicit; the total recognition rate of the PCA-based algorithm
whose performance is the worst of the three can even reach as
high as 97.00%. The reason for this phenomenon is that even
misjudging one conguration into another one of the same type
will still be regarded as the right judgment, which contributes to
the high recognition rate. However, in situations such as more
detailed information capture, the recognition of the type is not
enough as aforementioned.
Experiments are carried out on the interested target con-
guration recognition. The curve of recognition rate versus
dimensionality is shown in Fig. 2. As can be seen, the proposed
algorithm (with red solid line) can obtain better results than
both the LPP-based algorithm (with green dashed line) and the
PCA-based algorithm (with blue dotted line) for each congu-
ration. Different from type recognition, the advantage is much
more explicit in this situation. Table III displays the recognition
272 IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING LETTERS, VOL. 10, NO. 2, MARCH 2013
TABLE IV
CONFUSION MATRIX OF THE PROPOSED ALGORITHM
WITH THE BEST TOTAL RECOGNITION RESULT
rate of each conguration when the total recognition rate is the
highest, and Table IV is the corresponding confusion matrix
of the proposed algorithm. Inspecting Table IV, we can nd
out that, in the view of type recognition, 100% accuracy can
be obtained for BTR70, which is with only one conguration.
Even to the types BMP2 and T72, both with three different
congurations, there are only two mistakes. One of them is the
misjudgment of BMP2-sn9563 into T72-sn812, and the other
one is the misjudgment of T72-snS7 into BMP2-sn9566.
In this situation, the performance of the PCA-based method
is still the worst among the three. The reason lies in the
fact that the PCA-based algorithm cannot preserve the local
structure of the data, which is of great help to recognition [14].
The LPP-based method performs better than the PCA-based
one, although worse than the proposed one, because it makes
good use of the local structure of the data; the discriminating
information for recognition is preserved.
As to the proposed algorithm, satisfactory performance is
achieved by using the maximum desired information for recog-
nition through the statistical model. Owing to the advantage of
the Gaussian mixture distribution model, which can describe
any distribution accurately, a mixture of Gaussian distributions
is used to describe the error precisely with the consideration of
the particular statistical property of the SAR images. Moreover,
the locality preserving property is introduced into the statis-
tical model successfully to capture the local structure of the
data as the LPP algorithm [14]. Moreover, with the modied
construction of the afnity matrix, not only the advantage of
the local structure of the data is preserved but also the global
topological structure of the data is obtained, which is also useful
for recognition.
IV. CONCLUSION
A new way of feature extraction has been proposed for SAR
target conguration recognition in this letter. The statistical
property of the data is taken into consideration when extract-
ing feature. The maximum amount of desired information is
extracted effectively in the view of statistic. Due to the speckle
noise existed in the SAR image and the error of the model, a
mixture of Gaussian distributions is used to describe the un-
wanted component. Moreover, the locality preserving property
is embedded into the statistical model successfully, and thus,
the local structure of the data set is preserved effectively. The
parameters are estimated using the EM algorithm; promising
results are obtained.
Note that some advanced models have been proposed to
describe the statistical property of SAR images [15][17]. In-
troduction of these advanced models into the proposed method
will provide the basis of future research.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for
their helpful comments and suggestions.
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