Comparative study of the Gaussian form of the Bhattacharyya metric for ATR performance evaluation

Arnold C. Williams

doi:10.1117/12.281563

28 July 1997 Comparative study of the Gaussian form of the Bhattacharyya metric for ATR performance evaluation

Arnold C. Williams

Proceedings Volume 3070, Algorithms for Synthetic Aperture Radar Imagery IV; (1997) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.281563
Event: AeroSense '97, 1997, Orlando, FL, United States

Abstract

The Gaussian form of the Bhattacharyya distance measure is being used by some in the automatic target recognition (ATR) community to select features and to estimate an upper performance bound for ATR algorithms. One reason for the popularity of this measure is that it is readily computed. This paper shows through both empirical and analytic results the inadequacy of this metric. Empirical results are obtained by processing ADTS field data through both the Gaussian form of the Bhattacharyya distance and a nonparametric error estimation scheme. Analytic results are obtained by deriving the Gaussian form of the Bhattacharyya distance metric for distributions other than Gaussian. These results show that the Gaussian form of the Bhattacharyya distance cannot be trusted to provide a reliable upper performance bound. Additional empirical and analytic results show by using a nonparametric performance estimator that when the data is transformed to be more Gaussian the Bhattacharyya metric gives better performance estimates. The transformations discussed are the power transform and a mode seeker that decomposes the data into Gaussian modes. A conclusion is that tools can be and should be developed that improve the utility of the Bhattacharyya metric mainly since they provide useful information about the distribution of the data. The major conclusion is that even with these tools nonparametric error estimation techniques are superior. The nonparametric performance bounds are more reliable, and the proper use of the Bhattacharyya metric depends upon considerable knowledge of the data distributions.

Citation Download Citation

Arnold C. Williams "Comparative study of the Gaussian form of the Bhattacharyya metric for ATR performance evaluation", Proc. SPIE 3070, Algorithms for Synthetic Aperture Radar Imagery IV, (28 July 1997); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.281563

ACCESS THE FULL ARTICLE

INSTITUTIONAL
Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.

SELECT YOUR INSTITUTION

PERSONAL
Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.

PERSONAL SIGN IN

No SPIE Account? Create one

PURCHASE THIS CONTENT

SUBSCRIBE TO DIGITAL LIBRARY

50 downloads per 1-year subscription

Members: $195

Non-members: $335 ADD TO CART

25 downloads per 1 - year subscription

Members: $145

Non-members: $250 ADD TO CART

PURCHASE SINGLE ARTICLE

Includes PDF, HTML & Video, when available