Adversarial Attack for SAR Target Recognition Based on UNet-Generative Adversarial Network

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Some recent articles have revealed that synthetic aperture radar automatic target recognition (SAR-ATR) models based on deep learning are vulnerable to the attacks of adversarial examples and cause security problems. The adversarial attack can make a deep convolutional neural network (CNN)-based SAR-ATR system output the intended wrong label predictions by adding small adversarial perturbations to the SAR images. The existing optimization-based adversarial attack methods generate adversarial examples by minimizing the mean-squared reconstruction error, causing smooth target edge and blurry weak scattering centers in SAR images. In this paper, we build a UNet-generative adversarial network (GAN) to refine the generation of the SAR-ATR models’ adversarial examples. The UNet learns the separable features of the targets and generates the adversarial examples of SAR images. The GAN makes the generated adversarial examples approximate to real SAR images (with sharp target edge and explicit weak scattering centers) and improves the generation efficiency. We carry out abundant experiments using the proposed adversarial attack algorithm to fool the SAR-ATR models based on several advanced CNNs, which are trained on the measured SAR images of the ground vehicle targets. The quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the high-quality adversarial example generation and excellent attack effectiveness and efficiency improvement.