As a supervised deep learning algorithm well-suited for image processing, convolutional neural network (CNN) has shown great potential on synthetic aperture radar (SAR) automatic target recognition (ATR) and achieved superior performance in recent years. However, the training of the deep convolution network depends heavily on sufficient labeled samples while the SAR images are scarce and difficult to obtain, and it is time-consuming to artificially annotate labels for raw images. In this paper, a semi-supervised recognition method combining generative adversarial network (GAN) with CNN is proposed. We generated unlabeled images with GAN and set them as the input of CNN together with original labeled images, so as to implement the effective training and recognition with limited training samples. In order to address the instability training issue caused by the adversarial principal of GAN, a dynamic adjustable multi-discriminator GAN (MGAN) architecture is introduced in the proposed framework. Meanwhile, the label smoothing regularization (LSR) is applied to regularize the semi-supervised recognition model of CNN. Experiments carried out on the Moving and Stationary Target Acquisition and Recognition (MSTAR) dataset have indicated that the proposed method possesses the ability to improves the accuracy and robustness of CNN system especially when the training dataset is limited.

The development of deep learning has significantly boosted the development of ship detection in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. Most previous works rely on the convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which extract characteristics through local receptive fields and are sensitive to noise. Moreover, these detectors have limited performance in large-scale and complex scenes due to the strong interference of inshore background and the variability of target imaging characteristics. In this article, a novel SAR ship detection framework is proposed, which establishes the pyramid vision transformer (PVT) paradigm for multiscale feature representations in SAR images and, hence, is referred to as PVT-SAR. It breaks the limitation of the CNN receptive field and captures the global dependence through the self-attention mechanism. Since the difficulties of object detection in SAR and natural images are quite different, directly applying the existing transformer structure, such as PVT-small, cannot achieve satisfactory performance for SAR object detection. Compared with the PVT, overlapping patch embedding and mixed transformer encoder modules are incorporated to overcome the problems of densely arranged targets and insufficient data. Then, a multiscale feature fusion module is designed to further improve the detection ability for small targets. Moreover, a normalized Gaussian Wasserstein distance loss is employed to suppress the influence of scattering interference at the ship's boundary. The superiority of the proposed PVT-SAR detector over several state-of-the-art-oriented bounding box detectors has been evaluated in both inshore and offshore scenes on two commonly used SAR ship datasets (i.e., RSSDD and HRSID).

Matrix and tensor completion aim to recover the incomplete two- and higher-dimensional observations using the low-rank property. Conventional techniques usually minimize the convex surrogate of rank (such as the nuclear norm), which, however, leads to the suboptimal solution for the low-rank recovery. In this paper, we propose a new definition of matrix/tensor logarithmic norm to induce a sparsity-driven surrogate for rank. More importantly, the factor matrix/tensor norm surrogate theorems are derived, which are capable of factoring the norm of large-scale matrix/tensor into those of small-scale matrices/tensors equivalently. Based upon surrogate theorems, we propose two new algorithms called Logarithmic norm Regularized Matrix Factorization (LRMF) and Logarithmic norm Regularized Tensor Factorization (LRTF). These two algorithms incorporate the logarithmic norm regularization with the matrix/tensor factorization and hence achieve more accurate low-rank approximation and high computational efficiency. The resulting optimization problems are solved using the framework of alternating minimization with the proof of convergence. Simulation results on both synthetic and real-world data demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed LRMF and LRTF algorithms over the state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of accuracy and efficiency.

Tensor robust principal component analysis via tensor nuclear norm (TNN) minimization has been recently proposed to recover the low-rank tensor corrupted with sparse noise/outliers. TNN is demonstrated to be a convex surrogate of rank. However, it tends to over-penalize large singular values and thus usually results in biased solutions. To handle this issue, we propose a new definition of tensor logarithmic norm (TLN) as the nonconvex surrogate of rank, which can decrease the penalization on larger singular values and increase that on smaller ones simultaneously to preserve the low-rank structure of a tensor. Then, the strategy of tensor factorization is combined into the minimization of TLN to improve computational performance. To handle impulsive scenarios, we propose a nonconvex Ip-ball projection scheme with 0 <; p <; 1 instead of the conventional convex scheme with p = 1, which enhances the robustness against outliers. By incorporating the TLN minimization and the Ip-ball projection, we finally propose two low-rank recovery algorithms, whose resulting optimization problems are efficiently solved by the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) with convergence guarantees. The proposed algorithms are applied to the synthetic data recovery and image and video restorations in real-world. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed methods over several state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of tensor recovery accuracy and computational efficiency.

In this paper, a new algorithm is presented to image ground moving targets in a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system based on range frequency reversal transform-fractional Fourier transform (RFRT-FrFT). In this algorithm, a range compressed signal is initially transformed into the range frequency domain and then RFRT is proposed to directly compensate the range migration via multiplying the signal in the range frequency domain by its reversed data according to the equal interval sampling of range frequency variable, which can significantly decrease the computational complexity in target envelope migration elimination. Then, FrFT is applied to accomplish the target motion parameter estimation after range migration alignment. Finally, a ground moving target is well focused after motion compensation. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is validated by both simulated and real SAR data.

In a multichannel synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system, because of the target uncooperative motion, a ground moving target (GMT) is usually smeared, distorted, and shifted in an SAR image. In this article, a novel approach for multichannel SAR-GMT indication (GMTI) processing is proposed. The main innovations of this method are that a GMT can be well refocused and relocated since the target high-order Doppler parameters can be precisely estimated based on a high-order polynomial phase signal (PPS) model, and the target statistical amplitude and phase information is jointly applied to improve the radial velocity estimation robustness. Compared with the current SAR-GMTI algorithms, the improvements of this method over the existing methods are: 1) the topography interferometric phase can be effectively compensated by applying an adaptive 2-D spectrum filtering technique via iterative processing; 2) a GMT can be well imaged since the target Doppler chirp rate and the quadratic chirp rate can be well estimated via the 2-D coherent integration in the time–frequency plane; and 3) a GMT can be precisely relocated into its original position by applying the generalized amplitude and phase weighting technique. Real-measured SAR data processing results are presented to validate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method.