Hee-Sub Shin

Minjun Kim, Ohtae Jang, Haekang Song et al.

Synthetic aperture radar technology is crucial for high-resolution imaging under various conditions; however, the acquisition of real-world synthetic aperture radar data for deep learning-based automatic target recognition remains challenging due to high costs and data availability issues. To overcome these challenges, synthetic data generated through simulations have been employed, although discrepancies between synthetic and real data can degrade model performance. In this study, we introduce a novel framework, soft segmented randomization, designed to reduce domain discrepancy and improve the generalize ability of synthetic aperture radar automatic target recognition models. The soft segmented randomization framework applies a Gaussian mixture model to segment target and clutter regions softly, introducing randomized variations that align the synthetic data's statistical properties more closely with those of real-world data. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed soft segmented randomization framework significantly enhances model performance on measured synthetic aperture radar data, making it a promising approach for robust automatic target recognition in scenarios with limited or no access to measured data.

Oh-Tae Jang, Min-Jun Kim, Sung-Ho Kim et al.

Recently, computer-aided design models and electromagnetic simulations have been used to augment synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data for deep learning. However, an automatic target recognition (ATR) model struggles with domain shift when using synthetic data because the model learns specific clutter patterns present in such data, which disturbs performance when applied to measured data with different clutter distributions. This study proposes a framework particularly designed for domain-generalized SAR-ATR called IRASNet, enabling effective feature-level clutter reduction and domain-invariant feature learning. First, we propose a clutter reduction module (CRM) that maximizes the signal-to-clutter ratio on feature maps. The module reduces the impact of clutter at the feature level while preserving target and shadow information, thereby improving ATR performance. Second, we integrate adversarial learning with CRM to extract clutter-reduced domain-invariant features. The integration bridges the gap between synthetic and measured datasets without requiring measured data during training. Third, we improve feature extraction from target and shadow regions by implementing a positional supervision task using mask ground truth encoding. The improvement enhances the ability of the model to discriminate between classes. Our proposed IRASNet presents new state-of-the-art public SAR datasets utilizing target and shadow information to achieve superior performance across various test conditions. IRASNet not only enhances generalization performance but also significantly improves feature-level clutter reduction, making it a valuable advancement in the field of radar image pattern recognition.