SAR-ATR (synthetic aperture radar-automatic target recognition) is a hot topic in remote sensing. This work suggests a few-shot target recognition approach (FTL) based on the concept of transfer learning to accomplish accurate target recognition of SAR images in a few-shot scenario since the classic SAR ATR method has significant data reliance. At the same time, the strategy introduces a model distillation method to improve the model’s performance further. This method is composed of three parts. First, the data engine, which uses the style conversion model and optical image data to generate image data similar to SAR style and realize cross-domain conversion, can effectively solve the problem of insufficient training data of the SAR image classification model. Second is model training, which uses SAR image data sets to pre-train the model. Here, we introduce the deep Brownian distance covariance (Deep BDC) pooling layer to optimize the image feature representation so that the model can learn the image representation by measuring the difference between the joint feature function of the embedded feature and the edge product. Third, model fine-tuning, which freezes the model structure, except the classifier, and fine-tunes it by using a small amount of novel data. The knowledge distillation approach is also introduced simultaneously to train the model repeatedly, sharpen the knowledge, and enhance model performance. According to experimental results on the MSTAR benchmark dataset, the proposed method is demonstrably better than the SOTA method in the few-shot SAR ATR issue. The recognition accuracy is about 80% in the case of 10-way 10-shot.

Ship detection in large-scale synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images has essential value in both military and civilian applications. However, due to the complexity of the background and the simplicity of the texture, ship detection in large-scale SAR images is prone to false alarms, such as similar-shaped reefs, islands, sea clutter, and inland buildings. This article proposes a multisize inference fusion framework to eliminate false alarms and improve the overall performance of ship detection in large-scale SAR images. In this framework, a multisize slicer is proposed to expand the scale range of image expression. Then, a detection model library is built to keep various types of models for different task scenarios and requirements. Finally, two subapproaches are proposed for false alarm elimination, namely, pixel feature filtering (FAE-pff) and multisource fusion (FAE-msf), to reduce false detection results in the output of the detection model. FAE-pff calculates how obvious each target is relative to the background and eliminates less obvious results. FAE-msf obtains bounding boxes and corresponding confidences from multiple inference sources and fuses them through weighting and updating them to achieve complementation and enhancement of information. Various experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of each module qualitatively and quantitatively. It proves the effectiveness of the proposed framework, which can achieve more correct detections while greatly reducing erroneous detections.