Scattering Enhanced Attention Pyramid Network for Aircraft Detection in SAR Images

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Aircraft detection in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is a challenging task because of the discreteness, variability, and interference of aircraft scattering features. This article proposes a new hybrid approach of scattering information enhancement (SIE) and an attention pyramid network (APN). It first extracts strong scattering points (SSPs) of aircraft via an adapted Harris-Laplace detector. These SSPs are then clustered into candidate scattering regions by density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) and are then modeled with a Gaussian mixture model (GMM). Target scattering clusters are discriminated from background clutter by measuring the Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD) to the known target templates. These target scattering clusters are enhanced in the preprocessing stage. All the SIE-preprocessed images are then fed into the APN for training and testing. It is composed of the multiscale feature pyramid network (FPN) and the modified convolutional block attention module (CBAM) to cope with the discreteness and variability of aircraft. In addition, focal loss (FL) is adopted to deal with the issue of unbalanced sample distribution and the interference from hard samples. Experiments conducted on the Gaofen-3 and TerraSAR-X data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method with an average precision (AP) of 83.25%.