<title>Automatic target recognition using a multilayer convolution neural network</title>

Automatic target recognition (ATR) can obtain important information for target surveillance from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images. Thus, a direct automatic target recognition (D-ATR) method, based on a deep neural network (DNN), is proposed in this paper. To recognize targets in large-scene SAR images, the traditional methods of SAR ATR are comprised of four major steps: detection, discrimination, feature extraction, and classification. However, the recognition performance is sensitive to each step, as the processing result from each step will affect the following step. Meanwhile, these processes are independent, which means that there is still room for processing speed improvement. The proposed D-ATR method can integrate these steps as a whole system and directly recognize targets in large-scene SAR images, by encapsulating all of the computation in a single deep convolutional neural network (DCNN). Before the DCNN, a fast sliding method is proposed to partition the large image into sub-images, to avoid information loss when resizing the input images, and to avoid the target being divided into several parts. After the DCNN, non-maximum suppression between sub-images (NMSS) is performed on the results of the sub-images, to obtain an accurate result of the large-scene SAR image. Experiments on the MSTAR dataset and large-scene SAR images (with resolution 1478 × 1784) show that the proposed method can obtain a high accuracy and fast processing speed, and out-performs other methods, such as CFAR+SVM, Region-based CNN, and YOLOv2.

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A Novel Convolutional Neural Network Architecture for SAR Target Recognition

Journal of Sensors ◽

10.1155/2019/1246548 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 2019 ◽

pp. 1-9 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Yinjie Xie ◽

Wenxin Dai ◽

Zhenxin Hu ◽

Yijing Liu ◽

Chuan Li ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Neural Network ◽

Convolutional Neural Network ◽

Network Architecture ◽

Target Recognition ◽

Automatic Target Recognition ◽

Neural Network Architecture ◽

Data Set ◽

Stationary Target ◽

Optical Images

Among many improved convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures in the optical image classification, only a few were applied in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) automatic target recognition (ATR). One main reason is that direct transfer of these advanced architectures for the optical images to the SAR images easily yields overfitting due to its limited data set and less features relative to the optical images. Thus, based on the characteristics of the SAR image, we proposed a novel deep convolutional neural network architecture named umbrella. Its framework consists of two alternate CNN-layer blocks. One block is a fusion of six 3-layer paths, which is used to extract diverse level features from different convolution layers. The other block is composed of convolution layers and pooling layers are mainly utilized to reduce dimensions and extract hierarchical feature information. The combination of the two blocks could extract rich features from different spatial scale and simultaneously alleviate overfitting. The performance of the umbrella model was validated by the Moving and Stationary Target Acquisition and Recognition (MSTAR) benchmark data set. This architecture could achieve higher than 99% accuracy for the classification of 10-class targets and higher than 96% accuracy for the classification of 8 variants of the T72 tank, even in the case of diverse positions located by targets. The accuracy of our umbrella is superior to the current networks applied in the classification of MSTAR. The result shows that the umbrella architecture possesses a very robust generalization capability and will be potential for SAR-ART.

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