Dual Consistency Alignment Based Self-Supervised Learning for SAR Target Recognition With Speckle Noise Resistance

• Published in: IEEE journal of selected topics in applied earth observations and remote sensing Vol. 16; pp. 3915 - 3928
• Main Authors: Zhai, Yikui, Liao, Jinrui, Sun, Bing, Jiang, Ziyi, Ying, Zilu, Wang, Wenqi, Genovese, Angelo, Piuri, Vincenzo, Scotti, Fabio
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 2023; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Alignment; Artificial neural networks; Consistency; Convolutional neural networks; Deep learning; Dual consistency alignment (DCA); Learning; Machine learning; Neural networks; Noise; Noise intensity; Noise threshold; Radar polarimetry; SAR (radar); Self-supervised learning; self-supervised learning (SSL); Speckle; speckle noise; Synthetic aperture radar; synthetic aperture radar (SAR); Target recognition; Testing; Training
• DOI: 10.1109/JSTARS.2023.3267824
• ISSN: 1939-1404

Deep-learning-based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) has been widely applied in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) target recognition and made significant progress. However, due to the physical effects of the equipment used to collect images, various degrees of speckle noise will be introduced into SAR images. Traditional CNN-based SAR target recognition methods are premised on the same noise intensity in the training and testing set, which is contrary to the target recognition in practice. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel speckle noise resistant framework for SAR target recognition, called dual-consistency-alignment-based self-supervised learning. First, original SAR images are randomly added to speckle noise with different thresholds through multiplicative noise, after which contrastive pretraining is performed on unlabeled data. During this period, we combine instance pseudolabel consistency alignment and feature consistency alignment to align multiple threshold speckle noise views with original views under the same targets. Finally, the pretrained model is migrated to the downstream SAR speckle noise target recognition task. In this article, speckle noise modeling is conducted based on moving and stationary target capture and recognition data testing set, and experiment results reveal that this method can adapt to different intensities of speckle noise, is robust to modeled SAR image recognition, and maintains a high recognition rate even in small-sample learning.