PeaceGAN: A GAN-based Multi-Task Learning Method for SAR Target Image Generation with a Pose Estimator and an Auxiliary Classifier
This work addresses the problem of generating realistic SAR images for radar applications, but it is incremental as it builds on existing GAN frameworks by adding multi-task learning components.
The paper tackles the challenge of generating synthetic aperture radar (SAR) target images with GANs by incorporating both pose angle and target class information, resulting in improved diversity and quality of generated images compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Although Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are successfully applied to diverse fields, training GANs on synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data is a challenging task mostly due to speckle noise. On the one hands, in a learning perspective of human's perception, it is natural to learn a task by using various information from multiple sources. However, in the previous GAN works on SAR target image generation, the information on target classes has only been used. Due to the backscattering characteristics of SAR image signals, the shapes and structures of SAR target images are strongly dependent on their pose angles. Nevertheless, the pose angle information has not been incorporated into such generative models for SAR target images. In this paper, we firstly propose a novel GAN-based multi-task learning (MTL) method for SAR target image generation, called PeaceGAN that uses both pose angle and target class information, which makes it possible to produce SAR target images of desired target classes at intended pose angles. For this, the PeaceGAN has two additional structures, a pose estimator and an auxiliary classifier, at the side of its discriminator to combine the pose and class information more efficiently. In addition, the PeaceGAN is jointly learned in an end-to-end manner as MTL with both pose angle and target class information, thus enhancing the diversity and quality of generated SAR target images The extensive experiments show that taking an advantage of both pose angle and target class learning by the proposed pose estimator and auxiliary classifier can help the PeaceGAN's generator effectively learn the distributions of SAR target images in the MTL framework, so that it can better generate the SAR target images more flexibly and faithfully at intended pose angles for desired target classes compared to the recent state-of-the-art methods.