Separability Measure Supervised Network for Radar Target Recognition

Abstract

In the radar automatic target recognition (RATR) field, radar high-resolution range profiles (HRRPs) have garnered significant attention. While traditional methods focus on extracting features having physical explanations, including power spectra, FFT magnitudes, etc, the effectiveness of these features relies heavily on personal experience and skills. In contrast, deep learning networks have shown strong competence in extracting discriminative features of HRRPs. However, the deep learning networks’ feature extraction procedure is solely based on the targets’ label information, which has almost no correlation with the feature separability. As a result, this approach can lead to poor convergence and limited recognition performance. To address this issue, we propose a Separability Measure Supervised Network (SMSN), which integrates a separability measure based on the rate-distortion function into the loss function to direct the training of the network. Comparative experiments on the airplane electromagnetic simulation HRRP dataset demonstrate that SMSN achieves higher recognition accuracy compared to the backbone networks, with significantly improved feature separability.