MVFRnet: A Novel High-Accuracy Network for ISAR Air-Target Recognition via Multi-View Fusion

Abstract

Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar (ISAR) is a promising technique for air target imaging and recognition. However, the traditional monostatic ISAR only can provide partial features of the observed target, which is a challenge for high-accuracy recognition. In this paper, to improve the recognition accuracy of air targets, we propose a novel recognition network based on multi-view ISAR imaging and fusion, called Multi-View Fusion Recognition network (MVFRnet). The main structure of MVFRnet consists of two components, the image fusion module and the target recognition module. The fusion module is used for multi-view ISAR data and image preprocessing and mainly performs imaging spatial match, image registration, and weighted fusion. The recognition network consists of the Skip Connect Unit and the Gated Channel Transformation (GCT) attention module, where the Skip Connect Unit ensures the extraction of global depth features of the image and the attention module enhances the perception of shallow contour features of the image. In addition, MVFRnet has a strong perception of image details and suppresses the effect of noise. Finally, simulated and real data are used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. Multi-view ISAR echoes of six types of aircraft are produced by electromagnetic simulation software. In addition, we also build a millimeter wave ground-based bistatic ISAR experiment system and collect multi-view data from an aircraft model. The simulation and experiment results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can obtain a higher recognition accuracy compared to other state-of-the-art methods. The recognition accuracy can be improved by approximately 30% compared with traditional monostatic recognition.