Collaborative sparse priors for multi-view ATR

Recent work has seen a surge of sparse representation based classification (SRC) methods applied to automatic target recognition problems. While traditional SRC approaches used l₀ or l₁ norm to quantify sparsity, spike and slab priors have established themselves as the gold standard for providing general tunable sparse structures on vectors. In this work, we employ collaborative spike and slab priors that can be applied to matrices to encourage sparsity for the problem of multi-view ATR. That is, target images captured from multiple views are expanded in terms of a training dictionary multiplied with a coefficient matrix. Ideally, for a test image set comprising of multiple views of a target, coefficients corresponding to its identifying class are expected to be active, while others should be zero, i.e. the coefficient matrix is naturally sparse. We develop a new approach to solve the optimization problem that estimates the sparse coefficient matrix jointly with the sparsity inducing parameters in the collaborative prior. ATR problems are investigated on the mid-wave infrared (MWIR) database made available by the US Army Night Vision and Electronic Sensors Directorate, which has a rich collection of views. Experimental results show that the proposed joint prior and coefficient estimation method (JPCEM) can: 1.) enable improved accuracy when multiple views vs. a single one are invoked, and 2.) outperform state of the art alternatives particularly when training imagery is limited.