The selection of training samples is important for the accuracy and efficiency of the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image change detection task. However, training samples are traditionally extracted from the whole image, which leads to longer training time and an unbalanced number of pixels in the changed and unchanged classes. To overcome this problem, we propose a novel change detection method combining saliency detection with a principal component analysis network, named SDPCANet. To enhance the reliability of the training samples and reduce the amount of training samples, the SDPCANet uses context-aware saliency detection to obtain the salient region, from which the training samples are extracted. In addition, to alleviate the gap between the numbers of training samples in two classes, we regulate the candidate samples using the uniform-selecting strategy to enhance the reliability of the training samples for the SDPCANet. Then, the SDPCANet is trained with the extracted training samples and the remaining pixels are classified in the salient region to obtain the final change map. The experimental results on four sets of multitemporal SAR images demonstrate that the SDPCANet outperforms the reference methods proposed recently.

Although complex-valued (CV) neural networks have shown better classification results compared to their real-valued (RV) counterparts for polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) classification, the extension of pixel-level RV networks to the complex domain has not yet thoroughly examined. This paper presents a novel complex-valued deep fully convolutional neural network (CV-FCN) designed for PolSAR image classification. Specifically, CV-FCN uses PolSAR CV data that includes the phase information and uses the deep FCN architecture that performs pixel-level labeling. The CV-FCN architecture is trained in an end-to-end scheme to extract discriminative polarimetric features, and then the entire PolSAR image is classified by the trained CV-FCN. Technically, for the particularity of PolSAR data, a dedicated complex-valued weight initialization scheme is proposed to initialize CV-FCN. It considers the distribution of polarization data to conduct CV-FCN training from scratch in an efficient and fast manner. CV-FCN employs a complex downsampling-then-upsampling scheme to extract dense features. To enrich discriminative information, multi-level CV features that retain more polarization information are extracted via the complex downsampling scheme. Then, a complex upsampling scheme is proposed to predict dense CV labeling. It employs the complex max-unpooling layers to greatly capture more spatial information for better robustness to speckle noise. The complex max-unpooling layers upsample the real and the imaginary parts of complex feature maps based on the max locations maps retained from the complex downsampling scheme. In addition, to achieve faster convergence and obtain more precise classification results, a novel average cross-entropy loss function is derived for CV-FCN optimization. Experiments on real PolSAR datasets demonstrate that CV-FCN achieves better classification performance than other state-of-art methods.

The conventional methods for target detection and discrimination in high-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images usually have low accuracy and slow speed, especially for large complex scenes. To overcome these drawbacks, in this paper, we propose a target detection and discrimination method based on visual attention model. In the detection stage, to pop out the targets and suppress the background clutter in the saliency map, we select the task-dependent scales from the Gaussian pyramid of the original SAR image. Moreover, we adopt the clustering algorithm to remerge several isolated focus of attention areas, which are obtained from the saliency map, into a complete target region. The candidate target SAR image chips are extracted with relative high accuracy and low time cost in this stage. Since there may be single target, multiple targets, or partial targets with complex clutter in each SAR image chip, it is hard to acquire accurate target-shaped blob via segmentation. Some classical discrimination features which are extracted based on target segmentation may lose effectiveness. In the discrimination stage of our method, to solve the above problem, based on the saliency and gist (SG) features for optical satellite images, we propose the modified SG (MSG) features for SAR target discrimination. The MSG features are complementary to each other and can provide a more complete description of the extracted SAR image chips without segmentation, which also reduces the computation burden. The experimental results on the synthetic images and miniSAR real SAR image data set demonstrate that the proposed target detection and discrimination method can detect and discriminate the targets from the complex background clutter with high accuracy and fast speed in high-resolution SAR images.

Accurate range model with acceleration, the coupling phase terms, and spatial-variant (SV) Doppler parameters are the main issues to be solved in high-speed-high-squint SAR (HSHS-SAR) with a curved trajectory. For these issues, an extended Omega-K (EOK) algorithm is developed in this paper. The proposed EOK algorithm mainly includes the following four aspects. Firstly, a modified range model (AMRM) considering three-dimension acceleration for a curved trajectory is established. Then, the coupling between the range and azimuth direction is removed by the modified Stolt mapping (MSM). Subsequently, an improved high-order spatial-variant (SV) phase correction approach is derived to eliminate the azimuth dependence of Doppler parameters. Finally, in order to avoid zeros-padding operation, the proposed method focuses on the sub-aperture data in the range time and azimuth frequency domain through data aligning processing. The experimental results of both simulation and real data verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Traditional networked radar systems for target tracking usually suffer from a heavy data processing burden, and do not consider the sensor location uncertainties (SLUs), by assuming that radar locations are known perfectly, which is applicable only for static platforms. In this paper, considering sensors mounted on moving platforms, we propose a joint power allocation and measurement selection (JPAMS) strategy for multitarget tracking and data reduction in radar networks with the SLUs. The mechanism is to optimize the transmitted power and select the propagation paths with informative measurements, simultaneously. First, we adopt a distributed fusion architecture to estimate both states of targets and radars in clutter. Based on the distributed fusion architecture, the predicted conditional Cramér-Rao lower bound (PC-CRLB) considering the SLU and the measurement origin uncertainty is derived. Second, the JPAMS strategy is formulated as a bi-objective optimization problem, where the sum of weighted PC-CRLBs and the number of selected propagation paths are used as the performance metrics with respect to tracking and data reduction. The corresponding optimization is a NP-hard problem containing both continuous and binary variables. Third, to solve this nonconvex problem, we propose a sparsity-enhancing sequential convex programming algorithm. Finally, numerical simulations demonstrate the superiority of the proposed JPAMS strategy over the traditional allocation strategies.