Radar HRRP Target Recognition Method Based on Multi-Input Convolutional Gated Recurrent Unit With Cascaded Feature Fusion

Over the past decades, radar high-resolution range profile (HRRP) has been one of the research highlights in the field of radar automatic target recognition (RATR) due to its advantages of easy acquisition, small amount of data, and rich target structure information. However, most of the existing methods only consider its amplitude (time domain) characteristics, thereby neglecting the temporal dependence and multi-domain features inside the HRRP sequence. To this end, we propose an end-to-end multi-input convolutional gated recurrent unit neural network, called MIConvGRU, for RATR by both exploiting the multi-domain and temporal information to improve the recognition performance of HRRP target. Initially, the data-preprocessing module is employed to extract the multi-domain features of the target, including time domain, frequency domain, and time–frequency domain features, in order to further enhance the target representation. In addition, a cascaded multi-input GRU structure is designed to acquire the multi-domain temporal dependence feature of HRRP sequence from low to high level. Finally, these temporal features are adaptively fused by a parameter learnable strategy. The experimental results show that the proposed MIConvGRU can effectively learn the multi-domain temporal dependence correlation features in HRRP sequences, improving the target recognition performance.