Robust acquisition of relocatable targets

Three target types, namely T72, ZSU 23-4 and BMP-2 were measured in a tower/turntable configuration in several articulations each. A set of geometric, statistical, structural and polarimetric features is used to study the robustness of classification. Based on the Kolmogoroff-Smirnov distance between histograms a metric is defined that at the same time allows to quantify intra-class robustness and inter-class separability for an individual feature. For sets of several features, a simple classification approach in connection with a reference confusion matrix allows to assess the robustness of classification. It is demonstrated, that averaging the feature reference over all available target articulations improves the classification performance as compared to a reference that is based on one articulation only. Also, it is shown that in most cases, the classification is the better the more precisely the target aspect angle can be estimated independently. -- The paper reports work that is done in the framework of the NATO RTO/SET- 069 working group.