SAR ATR based on displacement- and rotation-insensitive CNN

• Published in: Remote sensing letters 2016-09, Vol.7 (9), p.895-904
• Main Authors: Du, Kangning, Deng, Yunkai, Wang, Robert, Zhao, Tuan, Li, Ning
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Accuracy; Algorithms; Classification; Datasets; Displacement; Neural networks; Sensors; Synthetic aperture radar; Target acquisition; Target recognition; Translations
• ISSN: 2150-704X; 2150-7058
• DOI: 10.1080/2150704X.2016.1196837

Among many synthetic aperture radar (SAR) automatic target recognition (ATR) algorithms, convolutional neural network (CNN)-based algorithms are the commonly used methods. However, most previous SAR ATR studies assume that the precise location (and heading direction) of a target is (are) known and image is not suffering from translations, which are not always true in realistic applications. In this letter, a modern CNN model is trained by samples with no rotation and displacement, and is evaluated on the dataset with rotation and displacement. The results show that the classification accuracy is very low when the target's displacement or rotation angle is different from the pre-assumed value in the training dataset. To overcome this problem, a displacement- and rotation-insensitive deep CNN is trained by augmented dataset. The proposed method is evaluated on moving and stationary target acquisition and recognition (MSTAR) dataset. It proves that our proposed method could achieve high accuracy in all three subsets which have different displacement and rotation settings.