Cédric Saleun

Antoine De Paepe, Pascal Nguyen, Michael Mabelle et al.

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) provides valuable information about the Earth's surface under all weather and illumination conditions. However, the inherent phenomenon of speckle and the presence of sidelobes around bright targets pose challenges for accurate interpretation of SAR imagery. Most existing SAR image restoration methods address despeckling and sidelobes reduction as separate tasks. In this paper, we propose a unified framework that jointly performs both tasks using neural networks (NNs) trained on a realistic SAR simulated dataset generated with MOCEM. Inference can then be performed on real SAR images, demonstrating effective simulation to real (Sim2Real) transferability. Additionally, we incorporate acquisition metadata as auxiliary input to the NNs, demonstrating improved restoration performance.

Benjamin Camus, Julien Houssay, Corentin Le Barbu et al.

This work aims to train Deep Learning models to perform Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) on Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images. To circumvent the lack of real labelled measurements, we resort to synthetic data produced by SAR simulators. Simulation offers full control over the virtual environment, which enables us to generate large and diversified datasets at will. However, simulations are intrinsically grounded on simplifying assumptions of the real world (i.e. physical models). Thus, synthetic datasets are not as representative as real measurements. Consequently, ATR models trained on synthetic images cannot generalize well on real measurements. Our contributions to this problem are twofold: on one hand, we demonstrate and quantify the impact of the simulation paradigm on the ATR. On the other hand, we propose a new approach to tackle the ATR problem: combine two SAR simulators that are grounded on different (but complementary) paradigms to produce synthetic datasets. To this end, we use two simulators: MOCEM, which is based on a scattering centers model approach, and Salsa, which resorts on a ray tracing strategy. We train ATR models using synthetic dataset generated both by MOCEM and Salsa and our Deep Learning approach called ADASCA. We reach an accuracy of almost 88 % on the MSTAR measurements.