Abstract  Reductionism and holism are two worldviews that underlie the fields of linear and  nonlinear signal processing, respectively. In the reductionist worldview, deviation from  linearity is seen as a noise that warrants removal. In the holistic worldview, the  system is viewed as a whole that cannot be fully understood solely in terms of its  constituent parts. Conventional radar resolution theory is a direct application of the  reductionist view. Consequently, analysis of single-channel synthetic aperture radar  imagery for automatic target recognition (SAR-ATR) has traditionally been based  on linear techniques associated with the image intensity while the phase content is  ignored. The insufficiency of the linear system theory to extended targets has been  empirically observed in the literature.  This thesis consists of a development of novel tools that exploit the nonlinear phenomenon  in focused single-channel SAR imagery and application of these tools to the  SAR-ATR problem. A systematic procedure to infer the statistical significance of the  nonlinear dynamics is introduced. Furthermore, two novel frameworks for feature extraction  from complex-valued SAR imagery are presented. The first framework is solely  based on the often ignored phase content, and it is built on techniques from the fields  of complex-valued and directional statistics. The second framework utilizes complexvalued  SAR imagery and provides for exploiting nonlinear and nonstationary signal  analysis methods based on the Poincaré and Hilbert views for nonlinear phenomena.  Using real-world SAR datasets, the overall results confirm the statistical significance of  the nonlinear effect for the case of extended targets. Furthermore, when the complexvalued  SAR image is detected, the nonlinear dynamics are found to be obliterated or  greatly altered. The efficacy of the frameworks developed is clearly demonstrated. Item Type: Thesis (Doctoral (PhD)) URI: http://research.library.mun.ca/id/eprint/8356 Item ID: 8356 Additional Information: Includes bibliographical references (pages 227-233). Keywords: radar, SAR, resolution theory, phase modulation, nonlinear dynamics, chaos theory, target recognition, impropriety, complex-valued signal, sonar, SAS, adaptive analysis, generalized central limit theorem, Poincare view, Hilbert view, holism, reductionism, extended target, point target, noncircularity, target detection, target classification, coherent imaging, nonlinear signal processing, nonlinear phenomena, emergence phenomenon, SAR-ATR, complex-valued statistics, directional statistics, MSTAR, Radarsat-2, Spotlight Department(s): Engineering and Applied Science, Faculty of Date: January 2015 Date Type: Submission Library of Congress Subject Heading: S