Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is an active microwave imaging sensor with the capability of working in all-weather, all-day to provide high-resolution SAR images. Recently, SAR images have been widely used in civilian and military fields, such as ship detection. The scales of different ships vary in SAR images, especially for small-scale ships, which only occupy few pixels and have lower contrast. Compared with large-scale ships, the current ship detection methods are insensitive to small-scale ships. Therefore, the ship detection methods are facing difficulties with multi-scale ship detection in SAR images. A novel multi-scale ship detection method based on a dense attention pyramid network (DAPN) in SAR images is proposed in this paper. The DAPN adopts a pyramid structure, which densely connects convolutional block attention module (CBAM) to each concatenated feature map from top to bottom of the pyramid network. In this way, abundant features containing resolution and semantic information are extracted for multi-scale ship detection while refining concatenated feature maps to highlight salient features for specific scales by CBAM. Then, the salient features are integrated with global unblurred features to improve accuracy effectively in SAR images. Finally, the fused feature maps are fed to the detection network to obtain the final detection results. Experiments on the data set of SAR ship detection data set (SSDD) including multi-scale ships in various SAR images show that the proposed method can detect multi-scale ships in different scenes of SAR images with extremely high accuracy and outperforms other ship detection methods implemented on SSDD.

Ship target detection using large-scale synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images has important application in military and civilian fields. However, ship targets are difficult to distinguish from the surrounding background and many false alarms can occur due to the influence of land area. False alarms always occur with ship target detection because most of the area in large-scale SAR images are treated as background and clutter, and the ship targets are considered unevenly distributing small targets. To address these issues, a ship detection method in large-scale SAR images via CenterNet is proposed in this article. As an anchor-free method, CenterNet defines the target as a point, and the center point of the target is located through key point estimation, which can effectively avoid the missing detection of small targets. At the same time, the spatial shuffle-group enhance (SSE) attention module is introduced into CenterNet. Through SSE, the stronger semantic features are extracted while suppressing some noise to reduce false positives caused by inshore and inland interferences. The experiments on the public SAR-ship-data set show that the proposed method can detect all targets without missed detection with dense-docking targets. For the ship targets in large-scale SAR images from Sentinel 1, the proposed method can also detect targets near the shore and in the sea with high accuracy, which outperforms the methods like faster R-convolutional neural network (CNN), single-shot multibox detector (SSD), you only look once (YOLO), feature pyramid network (FPN), and their variations.

As a mission critical sensor, SAR has been applied in environmental monitoring and battlefield surveillance. And SAR target recognition is one of the most important application of SAR technology. However, in practical applications, the number of samples available for training is relatively small, so the SAR target recognition can be regarded as a small sample recognition problem. One of the main directions to solve the small sample recognition problem is to realize the data augmentation. Therefore, a SAR image data augmentation method Via Generative Adversarial Nets (GAN) is proposed in this paper. The method uses Wasserstein GAN with a gradient penalty (WGAN-GP) to generate new samples based on existing SAR data, which can augment the sample number in training dataset. Meanwhile, sample selection filters are designed to extract the generated samples with high quality and specific azimuth, which can avoid the randomness of data augmentation, and to improve the quality of new generated training samples. Experiments based on MSTAR data show that, for three-class recognition problem, when the training sample is only 108, the proposed method can improve the recognition rate from 79% to 91.6%; For ten-class recognition problem, when the training sample is only 360, the proposed method can improve the recognition rate from 57.48% to 79.59%. Compared with the traditional data linear generation method, the proposed method shows significantly improvement on the quantity and quality of the training samples, and can effectively solve the problem of small sample recognition.

Under the framework of a supervised learning-based automatic target recognition (ATR) approach, recognition performance is primarily dependent on the amount of training samples. However, shortage in training samples is a consistent issue for ATR. In this article, we propose a new image to image generation method, called label-directed generative adversarial networks (LDGANs), which will provide labeled samples to be used for recognition model training. We define an entirely new loss function for the LDGAN, which utilizes the Wasserstein distance to replace the original distance measurement of the conventional generative adversarial networks (GANs), thus efficiently avoiding the collapse mode problem. The label information is also added to the loss function of the LDGAN to avoid generating a large number of unlabeled target images. More importantly, the proposed method also makes corresponding changes to the network architecture regarding the new GANs. At the same time, the detailed algorithm about the LDGAN is also introduced in this article to deal with the issue that characteristically GANs are not easy to train. Based on comparisons with other directed generation methods, the experimental results show comparative results of several types of generated images in statistical features, gradient features, classic features of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) targets and the independence from the real image. While demonstrating that the images generated by the LDGAN produced better results using the assumptions of independent and identical distribution, the experiment also explores the performance of the generated image in the ATR. A comparison of these experimental results demonstrates a better way to use the generated image for ATR. The experimental results also prove that the proposed method does have the ability to supplement information for ATR when the training sample information is insufficient.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been widely used in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) target recognition. Traditional CNNs suffer from expensive computation and high memory consumption, impeding their deployment in real-time recognition systems of SAR sensors, as these systems have low memory resources and low speed of calculation. In this paper, a micro CNN (MCNN) for real-time SAR recognition system is proposed. The proposed MCNN has only two layers, and it is compressed from a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) with 18 layers by a novel knowledge distillation algorithm called gradual distillation. MCNN is a ternary network, and all its weights are either -1 or 1 or 0. Following a student-teacher paradigm, the DCNN is the teacher network and MCNN is its student network. The gradual distillation makes MCNN a better learning route than traditional knowledge distillation. The experiments on the MSTAR dataset show that the proposed MCNN can obtain a high recognition rate which is almost the same as the DCNN. However, compared with the DCNN, the memory footprint of the proposed MCNN is compressed 177 times, and the calculated amount is 12.8 times less, which means that the proposed MCNN can obtain better performance with the smaller network.