Feature Joint Learning for SAR Target Recognition

The features employed for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) target recognition have evolved from traditional SAR target geometric features and pattern features to modern deep features, indicating a trend of increasing recognition accuracy but decreasing feature interpretability. Therefore, the fusion of multidimensional features has been investigated by many researchers. Existing feature fusion methods typically involve simple concatenation or addition of geometric features and pattern features with deep features, or directly incorporating them into deep networks. However, such fusion methods mentioned above inadequately consider the potential conflicts between features and hard to fully exploit multidimensional features. To solve the above problem, a multidimensional feature joint learning framework (MFJL-Framework) that serves the SAR target recognition task is proposed in this article, which consists of three models. Specifically, the SGC-GA-Model can select pattern features for SAR targets based on geometric feature constraints, the Global and local Feature Information interaction Capture model (GFIC-Model) can select deep features with high-level abstract semantics, and the MFFS-Model can complement and fuse these two types of features to maximize the utilization of feature information. Experiments and comprehensive ablation studies on four datasets, namely OpenSARShip-1.0, FUSAR-Ship, MSTAR-T72Variants, and SAR-AIRcraft-1.0, collectively demonstrate that the recognition performance of our proposed FJL-Framework outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods.