Incremental learning using feature labels for synthetic aperture radar automatic target recognition

Abstract

Although deep neural network technology brings high recognition accuracy to the field of synthetic aperture radar image-based automatic target recognition, it also produces the catastrophic forgetting problem. Here, a new incremental learning method that can extract more information about old data is proposed. Based on the rehearsal method, the authors’ method adds extra linear layers after the feature extractor of the network before training on new incremental data and uses the network to generate distilled labels for incremental training. Through experiments on the moving and stationary target acquisition and recognition data set, we conclude that, when the old model has good performance, our method has better performance than other typical incremental learning methods on small data sets.