A new scheme of radar target recognition based on parameterized high resolution range profiles (PHRRP) is presented in this paper. A novel criterion called generalized-weighted-normalized correlation (GWNC) is proposed for measuring the similarity between PHRRP's. By properly choosing the parameter of the mainlobe width in GWNC, aspect sensitivity of PHRRP's can be reduced without sacrificing their discriminative power. Performance of the scheme is evaluated using a dataset of three scaled aircraft models. The experimental results show that by using GWNC, only a small number of most dominant scatterers can achieve the same recognition rates as HRRP's, thus leading to a significant data reduction for the recognition system.
