Multiscale CNN Based on Component Analysis for SAR ATR

This article proposes a multiscale convolutional neural network (CNN) based on component analysis (CA-MCNN) for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) automatic target recognition (ATR). The component information of a target is robust to the local variations of the target, which is not made the best of by traditional CNN-based methods. For learning the component information, we use the attributed scattering centers (ASCs) extracted from the target echoes as the components of the target for SAR ATR, which divides the SAR target according to the geometric scattering types of ASCs and can not only make the division results more robust but also accurately characterize the electromagnetic scattering characteristics of the target. Since the global information provided by the whole image is also important for SAR ATR, CA-MCNN combines the global information with component information to learn a more efficient and robust target feature representation. In addition, considering that the feature maps of the shallower layer in CNN focus on local and fine-grained information while the feature maps in the deeper layer focus on global and coarse-grained information, we fuse the multiscale feature maps obtained from different layers to enhance the feature description ability. Extensive experiments conducted on the moving and stationary target acquisition and recognition (MSTAR) data set prove the superior performance of CA-MCNN.