Ship detection in polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) images has attracted widespread attention in recent years. However, pixel-level detection methods are heavily affected by inherent speckle noise. In this letter, we proposed a detection method that enhances the ship-sea contrast beforehand by combining local statistical saliency and scattering mechanism coherence in superpixel-level. First, simple linear iterative clustering (SLIC)-based segmentation method is adopted for PolSAR images to generate superpixels. Then, local saliency is calculated based on superpixel-level similarity from the perspective of statistical characteristics. Based on this, the superpixel-level modified polarimetric coherence metric is obtained from the perspective of physical scattering mechanisms, which can help distinguish small ships with low saliency and strong sea clutters with high saliency. Ship detection is achieved by combining the two features above. The experimental results based on real PolSAR data show that compared with other classic and state-of-the-art methods, the proposed method has improved the figure of merit (FoM) by at least 4.28% and has increased the target clutter ratio by at least 8.43 decibel (dB) on average.

In the increasingly complex electromagnetic environment of modern battlefields, how to quickly and accurately identify radar signals is a hotspot in the field of electronic countermeasures. In this paper, USRP N210, USRP-LW N210, and other general software radio peripherals are used to simulate the transmitting and receiving process of radar signals, and a total of 8 radar signals, namely, Barker, Frank, chaotic, P1, P2, P3, P4, and OFDM, are produced. The signal obtains time-frequency images (TFIs) through the Choi–Williams distribution function (CWD). According to the characteristics of the radar signal TFI, a global feature balance extraction module (GFBE) is designed. Then, a new IIF-Net convolutional neural network with fewer network parameters and less computation cost has been proposed. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) range is −10 to 6 dB in the experiments. The experiments show that when the SNR is higher than −2 dB, the signal recognition rate of IIF-Net is as high as 99.74%, and the signal recognition accuracy is still 92.36% when the SNR is −10 dB. Compared with other methods, IIF-Net has higher recognition rate and better robustness under low SNR.

Large-scale, diverse, and high-quality data are the basis and key to achieving a good generalization of target detection and recognition algorithms based on deep learning. However, the existing methods for the intelligent augmentation of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images are confronted with several issues, including training instability, inferior image quality, lack of physical interpretability, etc. To solve the above problems, this paper proposes a feature-level SAR target-data augmentation method. First, an enhanced capsule neural network (CapsNet) is proposed and employed for feature extraction, decoupling the attribute information of input data. Moreover, an attention mechanism-based attribute decoupling framework is used, which is beneficial for achieving a more effective representation of features. After that, the decoupled attribute feature, including amplitude, elevation angle, azimuth angle, and shape, can be perturbed to increase the diversity of features. On this basis, the augmentation of SAR target images is realized by reconstructing the perturbed features. In contrast to the augmentation methods using random noise as input, the proposed method realizes the mapping from the input of known distribution to the change in unknown distribution. This mapping method reduces the correlation distance between the input signal and the augmented data, therefore diminishing the demand for training data. In addition, we combine pixel loss and perceptual loss in the reconstruction process, which improves the quality of the augmented SAR data. The evaluation of the real and augmented images is conducted using four assessment metrics. The images generated by this method achieve a peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of 21.6845, radiometric resolution (RL) of 3.7114, and dynamic range (DR) of 24.0654. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method.

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) automatic target recognition (ATR) technology has seen significant advancements. Despite these advancements, the majority of research still operates under the closed-set assumption, wherein all test samples belong to classes seen during the training phase. In real-world applications, however, it is common to encounter targets not previously seen during training, posing a significant challenge to the existing methods. Ideally, an ATR system should not only accurately identify known target classes but also effectively reject those belonging to unknown classes, giving rise to the concept of open set recognition (OSR). To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach that leverages the unique capabilities of the Capsule Network and the Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD) to distinguish unknown classes. This method begins by deeply mining the features of SAR targets using the Capsule Network and enhancing the separability between different features through a specially designed loss function. Subsequently, the KLD of features between a testing sample and the center of each known class is calculated. If the testing sample exhibits a significantly larger KLD compared to all known classes, it is classified as an unknown target. The experimental results of the SAR-ACD dataset demonstrate that our method can maintain a correct identification rate of over 95% for known classes while effectively recognizing unknown classes. Compared to existing techniques, our method exhibits significant improvements.

Deep learning-based automatic target recognition is a research hotspot in the field of synthetic aperture radar image interpretation, and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have made significant advancements in this area. However, CNNs suffer from feature confusion during feature extraction, which neglects the affiliation relationships between features. In addition, these methods hardly apply the attribute features of targets, leading to a lack of physical interpretation. To incorporate interpretable features containing attribute features into the recognition framework, we propose a multilevel capsule fusion network that integrates global and local attribute features. The network is comprised of a multilevel feature extraction module and an attribute attention reconstruction module (AARM). The MLFM hierarchical fusion capsule is utilized to extract multidimensional attribute features of targets, enhancing the physical interpretability of the. The AARM module employs a two-dimensional attribute attention mechanism to emphasize the distinctions between target attribute parameters, improving the separability of similar targets. Furthermore, we demonstrate the rationality of capsule form attribute features by applying perturbations to the reconstructed images which are obtained after the AARM module, encompassing attributes such as amplitude, azimuth, depression angle, and shape. Finally, we design a corresponding attribute loss function by measuring the L2 distance between various attribute parameters, achieving more precise target recognition. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method is superior to the state-of-the-art methods in recognition performance on both self-constructed measured datasets and the MSTAR dataset, demonstrating excellent generalization capabilities.

With the continuous exploitation of coal resources, human safety has been seriously threatened during the mining process. Therefore, it is of great significance to establish an efficient human infrared image recognition system. In this paper, three classes of infrared image data of the human body are collected by a thermal imager, namely Human, Human others and None. According to the characteristics of downhole infrared images, a distributed channel feature extraction module (DCFE) is designed, and DCA-Net is proposed based on this module. The experimental results show that the recognition rate of the network reaches 98%. Compared with other networks, this network has better recognition performance. Among them, the recognition rate of DCA-Net50 reaches 98.214%, the amount of parameters and calculations are relatively small, and the cost-effectiveness is the highest. It is suitable for the human body infrared image recognition system that requires high accuracy and high real-time performance.