This book text provides an overview of the radar target recognition process and covers the key techniques being developed for operational systems. It is based on the fundamental scientific principles of high resolution radar, and explains how the underlying techniques can be used in real systems, taking into account the characteristics of practical radar system designs and component limitations. It also addresses operational aspects, such as how high resolution modes would fit in with other functions such as detection and tracking.

The ability to detect and locate targets by day or night, over wide areas, regardless of weather conditions has long made radar a key sensor in many military and civil applications. However, the ability to automatically and reliably distinguish different targets represents a difficult challenge. Radar Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) and Non-Cooperative Target Recognition (NCTR) captures material presented in the NATO SET-172 lecture series to provide an overview of the state-of-the-art and continuing challenges of radar target recognition.

Increasing information content is an important scientific problem in modern observation systems development. Radar, or microwave, imaging, a technique which combines radar techniques with digital or optical information processing, can be used for this purpose. Drawing on their own research, the authors provide an overview of the field and explain why a unified approach based on wave field processing techniques, including holographic and tomographic approaches, is necessary in high resolution radar design. Such techniques use the complex field incident on an observation surface to produce a hologram, which can be used to reconstruct an image of the object or to restore some of its physical parameters. This makes it possible to extract the size, coordinates and radar cross-section of individual scattering centres.