Image Data Augmentation for SAR Sensor via Generative Adversarial Nets

As a mission-critical sensor, SAR has been applied in environmental monitoring and battlefield surveillance; moreover, SAR target recognition is one of the most important applications of SAR technology. However, in practical applications, the number of samples available for training is relatively small, so the SAR target recognition can be regarded as a small sample recognition problem. One of the main directions to solve the small sample recognition problem is to realize the data augmentation. Therefore, a SAR image data augmentation method via Generative Adversarial Nets (GAN) is proposed in this paper. The method uses Wasserstein GAN with a gradient penalty (WGAN-GP) to generate new samples based on existing SAR data, which can augment the sample number in training dataset. Meanwhile, the sample selection filters are designed to extract the generated samples with high quality and specific azimuth, which can avoid the randomness of the data augmentation, and improve the quality of the newly generated training samples. The experiments based on MSTAR data show that, for three-class recognition problem, when the training sample is only 108, the proposed method can improve the recognition rate from 79% to 91.6%; and for ten-class recognition problem, when the training sample is only 360, the proposed method can improve the recognition rate from 57.48% to 79.59%. Compared with the traditional data linear generation method, the proposed method shows significant improvement on the quantity and quality of the training samples, and can effectively solve the problem of the small sample recognition.