Abstract: The mathematical model of HRR profiles is first given, adn then the classification performance of the existing methods such as the Baseline method, Correlation method, Bispectrum method, Principal Eigenvector method, and Quardratic Classification method is analzed by teh distance discriminant criterion, from the phase of the averaged HRR profile(AHHRP) and the covariance matrix(COVM) of the profiles. The above methods are divided into two categories: linear classifiers based on AHHRP, and quadratic classifiers based on both AHHRP and COVM. The obtained result shows that the quadratic classifier has better performance in classification than the linear one because it uses the information in COVM of profiles besides AHHRP.

Key words: radar target recognition, HRR profile, pattern classifiers