A High-Quality Multicategory SAR Images Generation Method With Multiconstraint GAN for ATR

The high-quality training data sets are often insufficient in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) automatic target recognition (ATR) applications. The generative adversarial network (GAN) provides a way for SAR data augmentation. It is necessary to ensure the diversity, similarity, and correct category of the generated images so that these images can be served as the supplementary data set. In this letter, the multiconstraint GAN (MCGAN) is proposed to generate high-quality multicategory SAR images. First, an encoder is used to learn the features of the real images to enhance the similarity. Then, the encoded features are mixed with noise and category labels as the input of the generator to improve the diversity and category correctness. The generated images will be sent to a pretrained classifier to ensure the correct category. Finally, the improved Wasserstein loss with the gradient penalty is extended to the model to further improve the diversity and similarity of the generated images. The MSTAR data set is used to validate the proposed method on generation. The quality evaluation and classification tests are performed on the generated images, and the results show that the MCGAN can provide high-quality images, which could assist in achieving good classification accuracy.