Radar Target Detection With Multi-Task Learning in Heterogeneous Environment

From the perspective of feature extraction and classification, deep neural networks are widely used in radar target detection. However, in heterogeneous environment, the traditional deep neural networks are difficult to extract a robust feature, which leads to the degradation of network detection performance. In order to address this problem, a radar target detection method with multi-task learning in heterogeneous environment is proposed. Considering the influence of heterogeneous data distribution, the proposed method designs a contrastive learning module added to a multi-task autoencoder. It can learn a compact and distinguishable feature representation, which enhances the feature separability between the clutter and the target. Simultaneously, a classifier is introduced to realize a binary detection in the feature representation. Comprehensive experiments are carried out to show that the proposed method guarantees a good detection performance in heterogeneous environment and solves the issue of over-fitting to a certain extent. Compared with some classical detectors, the proposed method shows better performance.