Scattering Information and Meta-learning Based SAR Images Interpretation for Aircraft Target Recognition

Abstract

The sample scarcity issue is still challenged for SAR images interpretation. The number of geospatial targets related images is constrained of the SAR images interpretation ability of data acquisition, sample labeling, and the lack of target coverage. Our SAR-ATR method is demonstrated based on scattering information and meta-learning. First, the discrete distribution of the spatial structure of different types of aircraft is quite different in SAR images. An associated scattering classifier is designed to guide the network to learn more discriminative intra-class and inter-class feature descriptions. Our proposed classifier facilitates the modeling of discrete degree of the aircraft target quantitatively and balance the weights of sample pairs dynamically through the differentiated analysis of different target discrete distributions. In addition, an adaptive feature refinement module is designed to optimize the network cohesion for the key parts of the aircraft and reduce the interference of background noise. The proposed method integrates the target scattering distribution properties to the network learning process. On 5-way 1-shot emerging categorized recognition task involved only few samples, our experimental results demonstrate that the recognition accuracy of this method is 59.90%, which is 3.85% higher than the benchmark. After reducing the amount of training data by half, the proposed method is still competitive on the new category of few-shot recognition tasks.

Keywords

• synthetic aperture radar (sar)
• aircraft target recognition
• meta-learning
• scattering information