The template-based classification

which is considered as a conventional synthetic-aperture radar(SAR) automatic target recognition(ATR) approach

needs a stored set of templates of the targets at a reasonable number of different orientations.However

it results in the great consumption of computation and storage.Depending on the term

View-aspect

in Computer Vision and thus an approach is proposed to construct simplified prototype templates to replace the conventional library.The prototype templates are extracted by the Gustafson-Kessel(GK) algorithm with target key features according to the rules of optimizing recognition rate.Experiment was runned on simulating SAR data sets of typical ship targets and the results demonstrate that the approach can not only simplify the templates

but also improve the recognition performance effectively.