A Method for Analyzing Strong Scattering in SAR Images Based on a Differentiable Simulator

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is extensively employed in earth remote sensing, including both civilian and military sectors. Currently, establishing the correspondence between strong scattering regions in SAR images and the 3D geometry of the target has become a research hotspot. Traditional methods based on scattering center modeling overly rely on prior knowledge and manual annotation. However, neural network-based approaches often lack the constraints of SAR imaging principles when performing feature extraction. In this paper, we propose a method for analyzing strong scattering in SAR images based on a differentiable simulator to visualize the correspondence between strong scattering in SAR images and the 3D geometry of the target. Specifically, the differentiable simulator accumulates the scattering intensity in the scattering simulation stage to generate simulated SAR images at multi-pose. By computing the loss with the SAR image in the dataset (ground truth), the differentiable simulator can provide a direct mapping from the strong scattering in SAR images to the target's 3D structures. The effectiveness of the method is validated on a dataset of simulated SAR images based on the MSTAR. From the result we obtained, the correspondence between the 3D structures of the target model and the strong scattering in the image can be intuitively and clearly determined.