A Cross-Task Transfer SAR Target Recognition Method Based on AMFFNet and IACGAN

Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have shown excellent capability in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) target recognition. However, obtaining sufficient training samples for improving network recognition is difficult due to the deficiency of labeled SAR image data. To tackle the problem, a cross-task transfer method for SAR target recognition is proposed in this paper, which is based on a designed attention multi-scale feature fusion network (AMFFNet) and an improved auxiliary classifier generative adversarial network (IACGAN). In this method, firstly, a data augmentation method based on you only cut twice (YOCT) is devised for expanding the training samples. Secondly, the partial weight parameters of AMFFNet are initialized by the pre-trained IACGAN discriminator. Finally, AMFFNet is fine-tuned using the training samples. Additionally, on the network structure of AMFFNet, multi-scale features are extracted by adopting a multi-scale depth separable convolution module, which allows the model to acquire more informative features. Attention mechanisms are employed in this network to enhance its ability to capture important features while reducing the effects of noise. A multi-level feature fusion structure is used to further raise the representational capability of the model. Experimental results on multiple open-source real SAR datasets show that the proposed method can achieve better recognition performance under different percentages of training data, and the effectiveness and superiority of the method are confirmed by its robustness to noise.