IAM-ACGAN: A High-Accuracy Approach for SAR Image Augmentation

Limited by the scarcity of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems, image augmentation is of great significance to SAR image detection, target recognition, and other application fields. However, traditional image augmentation methods rarely consider the SAR imaging mechanism, resulting in the inability to accurately reflect the anisotropic characteristics of target scattering. This paper introduces a novel SAR image augmentation method based on rebooting auxiliary classifier generative adversarial networks (Re-ACGAN), named IAM-ACGAN (Integrating Attention Mechanism with ACGAN). In this scheme, IAM-ACGAN integrates two attention mechanisms, channel attention (CA) and spatial attention (SA), into the discriminator of the GAN backbone to enhance classification accuracy. These two mechanisms can enhance the channel and spatial features of the input SAR images respectively. A self-constructed simulation ship dataset and a MSTAR real dataset both demonstrate the effectiveness of IAM-ACGAN. Compared with ACGAN and Re-ACGAN augmentation methods, IAM-ACGAN can provide higher image generation accuracy.