A SAR Target Recognition Based on Guided Reconstruction and Weighted Norm-Constrained Deep Belief Network

The existing deep learning studies on synthetic aperture radar (SAR) automatic target recognition (ATR) mainly focus on the utilization of the amplitude of SAR image via convolutional neural network (CNN), while the electromagnetic scattering information is rarely considered. Given that scattering centers (SCs) can characterize the target’s electromagnetic scattering characteristics and describe the target’s physical structure information, the SC feature should be helpful for SAR ATR. Therefore, we propose a novel SAR ATR method that combines electromagnetic scattering information and graph convolutional network (GCN) effectively and directly. Specifically, we model each extracted SC as a node to convert the SCs into graph data. The constructed graph is learned via GCN to describe the target’s physical structure information, where the features of different GCN layers are fused to avoid the over-smoothing of GCN. Label smoothing is combined with GCN for the first time to alleviate the overfitting caused by the limited training data. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to introduce the GCN for effectively utilizing the SCs, proving that the structural characteristics of the SCs of SAR targets are remarkably beneficial for recognition. Extensive experimental results on the measured moving and stationary target acquisition and recognition (MSTAR) dataset show that our method can obtain superior recognition performance compared with the existing methods.

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) target recognition under extended operating conditions (EOCs) is a challenging problem due to the complex application environment, especially for insufficient target variations and corrupted SAR images in the training samples. This paper proposes a new strategy to solve these problems for target recognition. The SAR images are firstly characterized by multi-scale components of monogenic signal. The generated monogenic features are decomposed to learn a class dictionary and a shared dictionary, which represent the possible intraclass variations information and the common information, respectively. Moreover, a sparse representation of the class dictionary and a dense representation of the shared dictionary are jointly employed to represent a query sample for classification. The validity of the proposed strategy is demonstrated with multiple comparative experiments on moving and stationary target acquisition and recognition (MSTAR) database.

In order to improve synthetic aperture radar (SAR) target recognition performance, this paper proposes a novel method using multi-level deep features. The multi-level deep features are learned by the convolutional neural network (CNN), which are capable of describing the target characteristics from different aspects. In order to make full use of the discrimination contained in the multi-level deep features, the joint sparse representation (JSR) is used as the basic classifier, which performs the multi-task learning to jointly classify the multi-level deep features. It could not only represent each feature properly but also consider the correlations between different levels of features. Based on the solutions from JSR, the target label is classified as the training class with the minimum reconstruction error. By fully exploiting the discriminative information contained in the multi-level deep features, the proposed method could effectively enhance SAR target recognition performance. The moving and stationary target acquisition and recognition (MSTAR) dataset is employed in the experiments. The results show that the proposed method could achieve a significantly high recognition rate of 99.38% for classifying 10 classes of targets under the standard operating condition (SOC), which is higher than those from some reference methods drawn from current literatures. Under different types of extended operating conditions (EOCs), the overall performance of the proposed method keeps superior over the reference methods. In addition, the outlier rejection capability of the proposed method is also better than the compared methods. All these experimental results validate the high effectiveness of the proposed method.

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) based Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) systems have shown to be highly vulnerable to adversarial perturbations that are deliberately designed yet almost imperceptible but can bias DNN inference when added to targeted objects. This leads to serious safety concerns when applying DNNs to high-stakes SAR ATR applications. Therefore, enhancing the adversarial robustness of DNNs is essential for applying DNNs to modern real-world SAR ATR systems. Toward building more robust DNN-based SAR ATR models, this article explores the domain knowledge of SAR imaging process and proposes a novel Scattering Model Guided Adversarial Attack (SMGAA) algorithm which can generate adversarial perturbations in the form of electromagnetic scattering response (called adversarial scatterers). The proposed SMGAA consists of two parts: 1) a parametric scattering model and corresponding imaging method and 2) a customized gradient-based optimization algorithm. First, we introduce the effective Attributed Scattering Center Model (ASCM) and a general imaging method to describe the scattering behavior of typical geometric structures in the SAR imaging process. By further devising several strategies to take the domain knowledge of SAR target images into account and relax the greedy search procedure, the proposed method does not need to be prudentially finetuned, and can efficiently find the effective ASCM parameters to fool the SAR classifiers and facilitate the robust model training. Comprehensive evaluations on the MSTAR dataset show that the adversarial scatterers generated by SMGAA are more robust to perturbations and transformations in the SAR processing chain than the currently studied attacks, and are effective to construct a defensive model against the malicious scatterers.

Attributed scattering center is one of important features of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image. In this paper, a method for the matching of attributed scattering centers and its application to SAR target recognition is proposed. First, the attributed scattering centers of the test SAR image and template SAR images are extracted on the basis of the attributed scattering model. Second, the Hungarian algorithm is employed to match the two scattering center sets. Based on the one to one correspondence, we design a new similarity measure to evaluate the similarity between the two scattering center sets that will decide the target type of the test image. The similarity measure considers the effects of each individual scattering center, single matching pair, and missing alarms and false alarms; thus, it is more comprehensive. The experiment based on moving and stationary target acquisition and recognition database demonstrates the validity of the proposed method.

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) automatic target recognition (ATR) models based on deep neural networks (DNNs) are susceptible to adversarial attacks. In this study, we proposed an SAR black-box local adversarial attack algorithm named attention heat map- based black-box local adversarial attack (AH-BLAA). First, we designed an attention heat map extraction module combined with the layer-wise relevance propagation (LRP) algorithm to obtain the high concerning areas of the SAR-ATR models. Then, to gener- ate SAR adversarial attack examples, we designed a perturbation generator module, introducing the structural dissimilarity (DSSIM) metric in the loss function to limit image distortion and the dif- ferential evolution (DE) algorithm to search for optimal perturba- tions. Experimental results on the MSTAR and FUSAR-Ship datasets showed that compared with existing adversarial attack algorithms, the attack success rate of the AH-BLAA algorithm increased by 0.63% to 33.59% and 1.05% to 17.65%, respectively. Moreover, the low- est perturbation ratios reached 0.23% and 0.13%, respectively.

In the field of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) automatic target recognition (ATR), deep learning-driven methods perform well when numerous training samples are available. However, in practical SAR application scenarios, the number of available training samples is often scarce due to the limitation of observation conditions, which leads to major challenges for deep learning-driven methods in real-world deployment. Currently, the problem of ATR with only a few training samples has attracted much attention in the SAR field. In this article, we put forward an ATR method called azimuth-guided feature embedding network with dual inference mechanism (AGFEN-DIM) to achieve fewshot SAR target recognition. To be specific, the feature extraction model, i.e. azimuth-guided feature embedding network (AGFEN) is composed of the azimuth embedding module (AEM) and the dynamic feature embedding module (DFEN). Among them, AEM resorts to a set of azimuth-parameterized convolution kernels, aiming to make full use of information relevant to the current radar imaging environment. The proposed DFEN is capable of dynamically extracting the discriminative features of the target according to the input image under the guidance of azimuth-parameterized convolutional kernels. The dual inference mechanism (DIM) effectively integrates the inference results of improved prototype classification and label propagation strategy to boost the reliability and robustness of the recognition model for few-shot SAR target recognition tasks. Extensive experiments on the moving and stationary target acquisition and recognition (MSTAR) dataset demonstrate that the proposed AGFEN-DIM surpasses many state-of-the-art SAR ATR methods in various application scenarios.

Combination of global and local filters for robust SAR target recognition under various extended operating conditions

Cross-task and cross-domain SAR target recognition: A meta-transfer learning approach

In the field of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) target recognition, leveraging computer-generated labeled simulated SAR data to aid in the recognition of unlabeled real SAR data has garnered significant attention. However, the domain shift between the simulated and real domain contravenes the assumption of independent and identically distributed in deep learning. Moreover, the categories of real SAR data may not align precisely with those of the simulated SAR data, and the prior knowledge of the label shift typically remains unavailable. To align the common category samples and identify target-private unknown category samples in the presence of both domain shift and potential label shift, we introduce a two-stage universal domain adaptation (UniDA) method for simulation-assisted SAR target recognition based on adversarial uncertainty and neighbor relation (AUNR). The proposed AUNR introduces Dirichlet distribution-based evidential deep learning, which not only performs classification tasks but also characterizes decision uncertainty, enabling the model to express the concept of “Unknow”. In the first stage, alongside supervised learning, we leverage data augmentation-based contrastive learning to achieve robust feature representation. In the second stage, adversarial learning based on model and data uncertainty is employed to separate common and unknown class samples, and contrastive learning based on neighbor relation aligns samples in two domains according to their geometric relationships. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study on UniDA for SAR target recognition. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms previous state of-the-art methods in various label shift scenarios, which indicates the effectiveness of the proposed method.

The traditional multi-view synthetic aperture radar (SAR) automatic target recognition (ATR) is based on the assumption of viewpoint integrity of the dataset, requiring that the viewpoint information of all samples participating in the recognition is complete. To address the problem that SAR ATR is difficult under the training condition of an incomplete view sample set, a new cross-view SAR target recognition method based on view correlation extension and multi-task learning is proposed. To mine the complementary information between multi-view SAR images, the training datasets are clustered into subsets of different views based on the correlation coefficient. To improve the accuracy of cross-view recognition, we adopt the strategy of multi-view subsets corresponding to multi-task kernel sparse representation. For the decision values of each view subset, the fusion error is obtained by linear weighting. Finally, the total reconstruction errors accumulated from all tasks are identified. Experimental results on the MSTAR database in cross-view conditions show that our method outperforms the widely-used SAR ATR methods in several performance indicators.

The existing synthetic aperture radar (SAR) automatic target recognition (ATR) methods have shown impressive results in static scenarios, yet the performance drops sharply as new categories of targets are continuously increased. In response to this problem, this letter proposes a novel ATR method named multi-level adaptive knowledge distillation network (MLAKDN) to achieve incremental SAR target recognition. To be specific, an adaptive weighted distillation strategy is first proposed, which can alleviate the model from forgetting the knowledge of old categories by distilling multi-stage soft label information of old categories at the classification level. Then, a feature distillation method based on gradient maximum criterion is developed to filter and distill discriminative features, so as to further recall more knowledge of old categories at the feature level. Meanwhile, a model rebalancing technique is designed to effectively strike the balance of the model on new categories and old categories. Finally, a weighted incremental classification loss is presented to train the whole model. Experiments on the moving and stationary target acquisition and recognition (MSTAR) dataset and the synthetic and measured paired labeled experiment (SAMPLE) dataset illustrate that the proposed method is superior to some state-of-the-arts for incremental SAR target recognition tasks.

Due to the extensive information in multi-view images, multi-view synthetic aperture radar (SAR) automatic target recognition (ATR) has attracted much attention. However, most current algorithms ignore the integration of multi-view topological features intrinsically related to the characteristics of SAR images. Moreover, as well as not thoroughly exploring the inherent coupling relationship, the multi-view feature fusion modules in these algorithms are also prone to cause the serve parameter burden and insufficient generality of the entire ATR model. To tackle these issues, an ATR model called multi-view visual and topological feature coordination aggregation (MVT-CA) is proposed. First, two parallel feature extraction modules are employed to extract multi-view visual and topological features independently. Specifically, the topological feature extraction module (TFM) based on a hypergraph neural network is designed to extract the implicit topological features by aggregating the context refinement features of key points within the SAR images. Subsequently, a parameterfriendly feature coordination aggregation module (FCAM) with visual and topological consistency is introduced, which effectively integrates multi-view features to generate a unified representation for classification while enhancing the generality of the entire ATR model. Experimental results on the Moving and Stationary Target Recognition (MSTAR) and the Full Aspect Stationary TargetsVehicle (FAST-Vehicle) datasets verify the effectiveness of our MVTCA model, even in scenarios involving severe background noise and target deformation

Recently, significant advancements have been made in few-shot learning (FSL) methods based on metric learning, which have been widely applied to Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Automatic Target Recognition (ATR). These methods typically require experimental samples to exhibit sufficiently small intra-class distances. However, in practical applications, SAR target samples are often acquired under varying depression angles, resulting in mixed images. The inherent feature deviations caused by variations in depression angles lead to increased intra-class distances in the feature distribution, which adversely affects recognition performance. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach called the Dense Graph Prototype Network (DGP-Net). DGP-Net addresses the feature deviation problem by learning potential features and utilizes feature distribution modeling for classification. Specifically, by leveraging the information propagation mechanism of a densely connected Graph Convolutional Network (GCN), potential features are iteratively learned while retaining previous features, thereby clustering samples of the same class with different elevation angles and eliminating feature deviations. To avoid sampling examples located at the edges of the distribution in FSL tasks, which may lead to inaccurate GCN information propagation, we introduce a ”prototype node” mechanism to enhance the robustness of the model. We conduct experiments using samples from the Moving and Stationary Target Acquisition and Recognition (MSTAR) benchmark dataset with varying elevation angles for the same class. Experimental results on this dataset demonstrate the superior performance of DGP-Net. Specifically, in 3-way and 5-way classification tasks, the recognition accuracy of DGP-Net improved by over 4% compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. The source code for DGP-Net is available at https://github.com/Zhou-xy99/DGP-Net.

Images from different aspect views for one target, known as multiple views, are widely applied to improve synthetic aperture radar (SAR) target recognition. However, most of existing multi-view methods have strict constraint on the angle interval among multiple views. In this paper, a new multiview fusion method free from interval limitation using expectation maximization (EM) is explored for SAR image classification. Firstly, we apply convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract features effectively owning to its powerful ability of feature learning and then obtain the classification probability. Secondly, Multi-view Label Set (MLS) is automatically constructed from multiple views according to the probability and finally we use EM algorithm to classify SAR images intelligently. It is worth noting that the proposed method can be used flexibly according to the number of perspectives obtained and without angle interval constraint among multiple views. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method has better recognition performance than some state-of-the-art methods on the Moving and Stationary Target Acquisition and Recognition (MSTAR) dataset.