Multi‐scale group‐fusion convolutional neural network for high‐resolution range profile target recognition

Abstract

Convolution neural networks (CNNs) represent one of the workhorses of artificial intelligence applications. As a typical artificial intelligence application, a high-resolution range profile (HRRP) target recognition method based on CNNs has aroused a lot of research interest. Most CNNs use a relatively small and single-scale convolution kernel size to control the number of parameters and computational complexity, but recent studies indicate that CNNs with a small kernel size cannot extract enough spatial information, which hurts the recognition performance. Aiming at this problem, this paper proposes a multi-scale group-fusion one-dimensional convolution neural network (MSGF-1D-CNN) for HRRP target recognition. MSGF-1D-CNN utilises multi-scale group one-dimensional convolution (MSG 1D-Conv) and point-wise convolution (PW-Conv) to replace the standard convolution. Multi-scale group one-dimensional convolution can significantly reduce complexity and capture the information of targets within HRRP in different levels of detail to enhance feature extraction, while PW-Conv can realise the fusion of multi-scale features to help boosting recognition performance. Experiments on five mid-course ballistic targets in the HRRP dataset show that MSGF-1D-CNN has superior recognition performance, and the parameter number of the model is reduced by more than 2.4 times than standard 1D-CNN. Furthermore, MSGF-1D-CNN shows better performance on fine-grained HRRP target recognition and anti-noise robustness in most cases.