Multichannel False-target Discrimination in SAR Images Based on Sub-aperture and Full-aperture Feature Learning

Abstract

False targets caused by multichannel Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) are similar to a defocused ship in both shape and texture, making it difficult to discriminate in the full-aperture SAR image. To address the issue of false alarms caused by such false targets, this paper proposes a multichannel SAR false-target discrimination method based on sub-aperture and full-aperture feature learning. First, amplitude calculation is performed on complex SAR images to obtain the amplitude images, and transfer learning is utilized to extract the full-aperture features from the amplitude images. Then, sub-aperture decomposition is performed on complex SAR images to obtain a series of sub-aperture images, and the Stacked Convolutional Auto-Encoders (SCAE) are applied to extract the sub-aperture features from the sub-aperture images. Finally, the sub-aperture and the full-aperture features are concatenated to form the joint features, which are used to accomplish target discrimination. The accuracy of the method proposed in this paper is 16.32% higher than that of the approach only using the full-aperture feature on GF-3 UFS SAR images.

Keywords

• synthetic aperture radar (sar)
• deep learning
• sub-aperture feature learning
• ship target discrimination
• multichannel false-target