Dual Contrastive Learning Model for Representation Learning and Background Debiasing in SAR Object Classification

As a popular representation learning framework, contrastive learning has been widely used in SAR image interpretation for feature extraction. Recent studies have shown that some features obtained by the model are related to the background information due to the spurious correlation of the backgrounds during the SAR data collection. As a result, the generalization ability of the representation learning model will be greatly affected by the background information and cannot satisfy the requirements of practical applications. This paper constructed a multi-branch dual contrastive learning model that simultaneously compares the similarities between objects and backgrounds of various images. The motivation is to alleviate the impact of the spurious correlation between background information and the object category. The experimental results and interpretable Shapley value demonstrated that the proposed method significantly improved the generalization performance of the SAR object classification algorithm.