Radar HRRP Target Recognition Model Based on a Stacked CNN–Bi-RNN With Attention Mechanism

Abstract

The range resolution of high-resolution wideband radar is much smaller than the target size. Its echo signals tend to be diverse and sensitive to small changes of targets. Therefore, it is difficult to capture and distinguish the features in radar signals. In this article, we propose a radar target recognition pipeline based on a deep nested neural network. The framework consists of three parts: The translation sensitivity of the training data is first addressed in the preprocessing section. The second step is to obtain an embedded representation of the radar echo signals by the combination of the adjustment layer, convolutional neural network (CNN), and the squeeze and excitation (SE) block. Finally, the target is recognized through inputting embedded representation as a time sequence into the stacked bidirectional recurrent neural network (bi-RNN) based on an attention mechanism. Compared with the traditional methods, the proposed deep nested neural network extracts and takes advantage of the features of radar echo signals more effectively, including the envelope features and local physical structural features. The experimental results based on the test data indicate that the proposed method has a great advantage over other methods in the case of large data sets as well as small training data sets and is robust to the small translation of test samples and noises, exhibiting high engineering practical value.