Synthetic Aperture Radar Image Interpretation Research Articles

Exploring Distributed Scatterers Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar Attributes for Synthetic Aperture Radar Image Classification

Land cover classification of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery is a significant research direction in SAR image interpretation. However, due to the unique imaging methodology of SAR, interpreting SAR images presents numerous challenges, and land cover classification using SAR imagery often lacks innovative features. Distributed scatterers interferometric synthetic aperture radar (DS-InSAR), a common technique for deformation extraction, generates several intermediate parameters during its processing, which have a close relationship with land features. Therefore, this paper utilizes the coherence matrix, the number of statistically homogeneous pixels (SHPs), and ensemble coherence, which are involved in DS-InSAR as classification features, combined with the backscatter intensity of multi-temporal SAR imagery, to explore the impact of these features on the discernibility of land objects in SAR images. The results indicate that the adopted features improve the accuracy of land cover classification. SHPs and ensemble coherence demonstrate significant importance in distinguishing land features, proving that these proposed features can serve as new attributes for land cover classification in SAR imagery.

Innovative Rotating SAR Mode for 3D Imaging of Buildings

Three-dimensional SAR imaging of urban buildings is currently a hotspot in the research area of remote sensing. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) offers all-time, all-weather, high-resolution capacity, and is an important tool for the monitoring of building health. Buildings have geometric distortion in conventional 2D SAR images, which brings great difficulties to the interpretation of SAR images. This paper proposes a novel Rotating SAR (RSAR) mode, which acquires 3D information of buildings from two different angles in a single rotation. This new RSAR mode takes the center of a straight track as its rotation center, and obtains images of the same facade of a building from two different angles. By utilizing the differences in geometric distortion of buildings in the image pair, the 3D structure of the building is reconstructed. Compared to the existing tomographic SAR or circular SAR, this method does not require multiple flights in different elevations or observations from varying aspect angles, and greatly simplifies data acquisition. Furthermore, both simulation analysis and actual data experiment have verified the effectiveness of the proposed method.

A CFAR-Enhanced Ship Detector for SAR Images Based on YOLOv5s

Ship detection and recognition in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images are crucial for maritime surveillance and traffic management. Limited availability of high-quality datasets hinders in-depth exploration of ship features in complex SAR images. While most existing SAR ship research is primarily based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), and although deep learning advances SAR image interpretation, it often prioritizes recognition over computational efficiency and underutilizes SAR image prior information. Therefore, this paper proposes YOLOv5s-based ship detection in SAR images. Firstly, for comprehensive detection enhancement, we employ the lightweight YOLOv5s model as the baseline. Secondly, we introduce a sub-net into YOLOv5s, learning traditional features to augment ship feature representation of Constant False Alarm Rate (CFAR). Additionally, we attempt to incorporate frequency-domain information into the channel attention mechanism to further improve detection. Extensive experiments on the Ship Recognition and Detection Dataset (SRSDDv1.0) in complex SAR scenarios confirm our method’s 68.04% detection accuracy and 60.25% recall, with a compact 18.51 M model size. Our network surpasses peers in mAP, F1 score, model size, and inference speed, displaying robustness across diverse complex scenes.

Shadow-Based False Target Identification for SAR Images

In radar electronic countermeasures, as the difference between jamming and targets continues to decrease, traditional methods that are implemented based on classical features are currently unable to meet the requirements of jamming detection. Compared with classical features such as texture, scale, and shape, shadow has better discernability and separability. In this paper, target shadow is investigated and applied to detect jamming in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images, and a SAR false target identification method based on shadow features is proposed. First, a difference image is generated by change detection, which can extract the shadow region in single-time SAR images. Then, a three-step differentiation condition is proposed, which can distinguish false targets from real targets. Simulated experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively extract the shadow region in SAR images and accurately distinguishreal and false targets. Furthermore, the potential of shadow in SAR image interpretation and electronic countermeasures is also demonstrated.

CFRWD-GAN for SAR-to-Optical Image Translation

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images have been extensively used in earthquake monitoring, resource survey, agricultural forecasting, etc. However, it is a challenge to interpret SAR images with severe speckle noise and geometric deformation due to the nature of radar imaging. The translation of SAR-to-optical images provides new support for the interpretation of SAR images. Most of the existing translation networks, which are based on generative adversarial networks (GANs), are vulnerable to part information loss during the feature reasoning stage, making the outline of the translated images blurred and semantic information missing. Aiming to solve these problems, cross-fusion reasoning and wavelet decomposition GAN (CFRWD-GAN) is proposed to preserve structural details and enhance high-frequency band information. Specifically, the cross-fusion reasoning (CFR) structure is proposed to preserve high-resolution, detailed features and low-resolution semantic features in the whole process of feature reasoning. Moreover, the discrete wavelet decomposition (WD) method is adopted to handle the speckle noise in SAR images and achieve the translation of high-frequency components. Finally, the WD branch is integrated with the CFR branch through an adaptive parameter learning method to translate SAR images to optical ones. Extensive experiments conducted on two publicly available datasets, QXS-SAROPT and SEN1-2, demonstrate a better translation performance of the proposed CFRWD-GAN compared to five other state-of-the-art models.

Meta-Knowledge Guided Weakly Supervised Instance Segmentation for Optical and SAR Image Interpretation

The interpretation of optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images in remote sensing is general for many tasks, such as environmental monitoring, marine management, and resource planning. Instance segmentation of optical and SAR images, which can simultaneously provide instance-level localization and pixel-level classification of objects of interest, is a crucial and challenging task in image interpretation. Considering that most current methods for instance segmentation of optical and SAR images rely on expensive pixel-level annotation, we develop a weakly supervised instance segmentation (WSIS) method to balance the visual processing requirements with the annotation cost. First, we decompose the prior knowledge of the mask-aware task in WSIS into three meta-knowledge components: fundamental knowledge, apparent knowledge, and detailed knowledge inspired by human visual perception habits of “whole to part” and “coarse to detailed.” Then, a meta-knowledge-guided weakly supervised instance segmentation network (MGWI-Net) is proposed. In this network, the weakly supervised mask (WSM) head can instantiate both fundamental knowledge and apparent knowledge to perform mask awareness without any annotations at the pixel level. The network also includes a mask information awareness assist (MIAA) head, which can implicitly guide the network to learn detailed information about edges through the boundary-sensitive feature of the fully connected conditional random field (CRF), facilitating the instantiation of detailed knowledge. The experimental results show that the MGWI-Net can efficiently generate instance masks for optical and SAR images and achieve the approximate instance segmentation results of the fully supervised method with about one-eighth of the annotation production time. The model parameters and processing speed of our network are also competitive. This study can provide inexpensive and convenient technical support for applying and promoting instance segmentation methods for optical and SAR images.

A Self-Supervised Method Based on CV-MUNet++ for Active Jamming Suppression in SAR Images

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system is susceptible to electromagnetic jamming during imaging, which seriously affects the subsequent interpretation of SAR images. Aiming at the problem of active suppressive jamming, this paper proposes a suppression method of SAR suppressive jamming based on self-supervised complex-valued deep learning, which consists of a novel complex-valued jamming suppression network CV-MUNet++ and a self-supervised training strategy. CV-MUNet++ could fully use the amplitude and phase information of complex-valued SAR images. The network’s weights, activation functions, and convolution operations are designed for complex domain processing. The different information representations of target and jamming in amplitude and phase in SAR images are mined to achieve jamming suppression. The self-supervised training strategy is proposed to solve the problem of relying heavily on manually labeled samples in the traditional network training process and is suitable for application scenarios where ground truth is difficult to obtain under complex jamming. The experimental results show that the proposed method could effectively suppress the active jamming of complex backgrounds and has the ability to self-supervised intelligent jamming suppression.

UltraHi-PrNet: An Ultra-High Precision Deep Learning Network for Dense Multi-Scale Target Detection in SAR Images

Multi-scale target detection in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is one of the key techniques of SAR image interpretation, which is widely used in national defense and security. However, multi-scale targets include several types. For example, targets with similar-scale, large-scale, and ultra-large-scale differences coexist in SAR images. In particular, it is difficult for existing target detection methods to detect both ultra-large-scale targets and ultra-small-scale targets in SAR images, resulting in poor detection results for these two types of targets. To solve these problems, this paper proposes an ultra-high precision deep learning network (UltraHi-PrNet) to detect dense multi-scale targets. Firstly, a novel scale transfer layer is constructed to transfer the features of targets of different scales from bottom networks to top networks, ensuring that the features of ultra-small-scale, small-scale, and medium-scale targets in SAR images can be extracted more easily. Then, a novel scale expansion layer is constructed to increase the range of the receptive field of feature extraction without increasing the feature resolution, ensuring that the features of large-scale and ultra-large-scale targets in SAR images can be extracted more easily. Next, the scale expansion layers with different expansion rates are densely connected to different stages of the backbone network, and the features of the target with ultra-large-scale differences are extracted. Finally, the classification and regression of targets were achieved based on Faster R-CNN. Based on the SAR ship detection dataset (SSDD), AIR-SARShip-1.0, high-resolution SAR ship detection dataset-2.0 (high-resolution SSDD-2.0), the SAR-ship-dataset, and the Gaofen-3 airport dataset, the experimental results showed that this method can detect similar-scale, large-scale, and ultra-large-scale targets more easily. At the same time, compared with other advanced SAR target detection methods, the proposed method can achieve higher accuracy.

Multi-Stream Fast Fourier Convolutional Neural Network for Automatic Target Recognition of Ground Military Vehicle

The synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is very useful in both military and civilian applications due to its 24/7, all-weather, and high resolution capabilities, as well as its ability to recognize camouflage and penetrating cover. In the field of SAR image interpretation, target recognition is an important research challenge for researchers all over the world. With the application of high-resolution SAR, the imaging area has been expanding, and different imaging modes have appeared one after another. There are many difficulties with the conventional understanding of human interpretation. There are issues like slow movement, a lot of labor, and poor judgment. Technology for intelligent interpretation needs to be developed immediately. Although deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have proven extremely efficient in image recognition, one of the major drawbacks is that they require more parameters as their layers increase. The cost of convolution operation for all convolutional layers is therefore high, and learning lag results from the inevitable rise in computation as the size of the image kernel grows. This study proposes a three ways input of SAR images into multi-stream fast Fourier convolutional neural network (MS-FFCNN). The technique elaborates on the transformation of rudimentary multi-stream CNN into MS-FFCNN. By utilizing the fast Fourier transformation instead of the standard convolution, it lowers the cost of image convolution in CNNs, which lowers the overall computational cost. The multiple streams of FFCNN overcome the problem of insufficient sample size and further improve the long training time while also improving the recognition accuracy. The proposed method yielded good recognition accuracy of 99.92%.

Flood Detection in Dual-Polarization SAR Images Based on Multi-Scale Deeplab Model

The proliferation of massive polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data helps promote the development of SAR image interpretation. Due to the advantages of powerful feature extraction capability and strong adaptability for different tasks, deep learning has been adopted in the work of SAR image interpretation and has achieved good results. However, most deep learning methods only employ single-polarization SAR images and ignore the water features embedded in multi-polarization SAR images. To fully exploit the dual-polarization SAR data and multi-scale features of SAR images, an effective flood detection method for SAR images is proposed in this paper. In the proposed flood detection method, a powerful Multi-Scale Deeplab (MS-Deeplab) model is constructed based on the dual-channel MobileNetV2 backbone and the classic DeeplabV3+ architecture to improve the ability of water feature extraction in SAR images. Firstly, the dual-channel feature extraction backbone based on the lightweight MobileNetV2 separately trains the dual-polarization SAR images, and the obtained training parameters are merged with the linear weighting to fuse dual-polarization water features. Given the multi-scale space information in SAR images, then, a multi-scale feature fusion module is introduced to effectively utilize multi-layer features and contextual information, which enhances the representation of water features. Finally, a joint loss function is constructed based on cross-entropy and a dice coefficient to deal with the imbalanced categorical distribution in the training dataset. The experimental results on the time series of Sentinel-1A SAR images show that the proposed method for flood detection has a strong ability to locate water boundaries and tiny water bodies in complex scenes. In terms of quantitative assessment, MS-Deeplab can achieve a better performance compared with other mainstream semantic segmentation models, including PSPNet, Unet and the original DeeplabV3+ model, with a 3.27% intersection over union (IoU) and 1.69% pixel accuracy (PA) improvement than the original DeeplabV3+ model.

Two-dimensional bidirectional principal component collaborative projection feature for SAR vehicle target recognition

With the continuous improvement in the resolution of synthetic aperture radar (SAR), there are many problems in the interpretation of high-resolution SAR images, such as a large amount of data and low efficiency of target recognition. In this paper, a novel SAR target recognition method based on a two-dimensional bidirectional principal component cooperative representation projection feature ((2D)2PCA-CRP) is proposed. First, (2D)2PCA is used to project the image into the low-dimensional feature space, and the redundant information in the high-resolution SAR image is filtered while considering the spatial structure. Then, the spatial global separability feature and local structure feature of the target in the high-resolution SAR image are extracted by CRP to form the (2D)2PCA-CRP feature. Finally, based on this feature, the nearest neighbour classifier is used to complete the target recognition experiments on MSTAR data. The experiments of this study are divided into three parts using standard operation condition (SOC) samples, type change samples and radar incidence angle change data. The experimental results show that the proposed feature achieves better target recognition performance in high-resolution SAR images.

An Improved RFI Mitigation Approach for SAR Based on Low-Rank Sparse Decomposition: From the Perspective of Useful Signal Protection

As an open system, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) inevitably receives radio frequency interference (RFI) generated by electromagnetic equipment in the same band. The existence of RFI seriously affects SAR signal processing and image interpretation. In recent years, many algorithms and models related to RFI mitigation have been proposed. However, most of that focus on effectively mitigating the RFI is insufficient to protect the useful signals. This article proposes a mitigation method of RFI with a signal-protected capability. (1) The kurtosis coefficient is used to detect RFI pulse-by-pulse, and the echoes containing RFI are stored in matrix form. (2) The preliminary extraction of RFI is complete by low-rank sparse decomposition of the echo matrix containing RFI. (3) For the secondary separation of RFI, the accurate position of RFI in the preliminary extraction results is located by the fuzzy C-means clustering; then, we separate the RFI and the remaining useful signals again and reconstruct the useful signals to complete the mitigation work. The proposed method can further protect useful signals while effectively removing interference through the secondary separation of RFI. Experimental results based on simulated and measured data verify the performance and potential of the proposed method.

Physically explainable CNN for SAR image classification

Integrating the special electromagnetic characteristics of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) in deep neural networks is essential in order to enhance the explainability and physics awareness of deep learning. In this paper, we first propose a novel physically explainable convolutional neural network for SAR image classification, namely physics guided and injected learning (PGIL). It comprises three parts: (1) explainable models (XM) to provide prior physics knowledge, (2) physics guided network (PGN) to encode the knowledge into physics-aware features, and (3) physics injected network (PIN) to adaptively introduce the physics-aware features into classification pipeline for label prediction. A hybrid Image-Physics SAR dataset format is proposed for evaluation, with both Sentinel-1 and Gaofen-3 SAR data being experimented. The results show that the proposed PGIL substantially improve the classification performance in case of limited labeled data compared with the counterpart data-driven CNN and other pre-training methods. Additionally, the physics explanations are discussed to indicate the interpretability and the physical consistency preserved in the predictions. We deem the proposed method would promote the development of physically explainable deep learning in SAR image interpretation field.

Automatic Target Recognition of SAR Images Using Collaborative Representation.

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) automatic target recognition (ATR) is one of the key technologies for SAR image interpretation. This paper proposes a SAR target recognition method based on collaborative representation-based classification (CRC). The collaborative coding adopts the global dictionary constructed by training samples of all categories to optimally reconstruct the test samples and determines the target category according to the reconstruction error of each category. Compared with the sparse representation methods, the collaborative representation strategy can improve the representation ability of a small number of training samples for test samples. For SAR target recognition, the resources of training samples are very limited. Therefore, the collaborative representation is more suitable. Based on the MSTAR dataset, the experiments are carried out under a variety of conditions and the proposed method is compared with other classifiers. Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve superior recognition performance under the standard operating condition (SOC), configuration variances, depression angle variances, and a small number of training samples, which proves its effectiveness.

Robust image similarity metric method for SAR images

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image similarity metric is at the core of SAR image interpretation techniques, however, it is still a challenging task due to complex nonlinear intensity, scale, and rotation differences between SAR images and other remote sensing images. This letter addresses this problem by proposing a novel similarity metric method for SAR images using structure and shape properties. The magnitude and orientation representation of the phase congruency model is first built based on the local phase of images. Then a new scale and rotation-invariant local binary pattern (SRI-LBP) descriptor is proposed using local structure and shape information. Finally, a similarity metric is defined using the symmetry Kullback Leibler divergence (SKLD) of the SRI-LBP descriptors. Numerical experiment results verify its robustness in terms of nonlinear intensity, scale, and rotation differences.

Multi-Scale translation method from SAR to optical remote sensing images based on conditional generative adversarial network

ABSTRACT Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has all-weather and all-day observation capabilities and a certain ability to penetrate the surface; therefore, it has unique advantages in many aspects, which other remote sensing methods cannot achieve. However, owing to imaging principles, the interpretation of SAR images is complicated. Therefore, converting SAR images into optical remote sensing images is one method of SAR image interpretation. Therefore, this paper proposes an improved conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN) that includes a generator based on the encoder-decoder structure of the swin transformer feature extraction module. The generator uses a spatial pyramid structure and multi-scale depth feature extraction structure to extract the SAR image features at different scales. A multi-scale discriminator was used to discriminate images on different scales. The introduction of feature matching loss makes the discriminator’s feedback to the generator richer and uses perceptual loss based on VGGNet to evaluate the image quality in depth. A series of experiments verified the effectiveness of the method in this study and proved the potential of the transformer structure in the field of SAR image translation. The method presented in this paper has obvious advantages and can translate SAR images into optical remote sensing images.

A Scale-Aware Pyramid Network for Multi-Scale Object Detection in SAR Images

Multi-scale object detection within Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images has become a research hotspot in SAR image interpretation. Over the past few years, CNN-based detectors have advanced sharply in SAR object detection. However, the state-of-the-art detection methods are continuously limited in Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) designing and detection anchor setting aspects due to feature misalignment and targets’ appearance variation (i.e., scale change, aspect ratio change). To address the mentioned limitations, a scale-aware feature pyramid network (SARFNet) is proposed in this study, which comprises a scale-adaptive feature extraction module and a learnable anchor assignment strategy. To be specific, an enhanced feature pyramid sub-network is developed by introducing a feature alignment module to estimate the pixel offset and contextually align the high-level features. Moreover, a scale-equalizing pyramid convolution is built through 3-D convolution within the feature pyramid to improve inter-scale correlation at different feature levels. Furthermore, a self-learning anchor assignment is set to update hand-crafted anchor assignments to learnable anchor/feature configuration. By using the dynamic anchors, the detector of this study is capable of flexibly matching the target with different appearance changes. According to extensive experiments on public SAR image data sets (SSDD and HRSID), our algorithm is demonstrated to outperform existing boat detectors.

Target Region Segmentation in SAR Vehicle Chip Image With ACM Net

Target region segmentation of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is one of the challenging problems in SAR image interpretation. The existing conventional segmentation methods rely on parameter selection in different backgrounds. Compared with traditional methods, the deep-learning-based methods can reduce the dependency on parameters and achieve more accurate results. However, lacking annotation data limits the application of the deep-learning-based methods in SAR chip image segmentation aspect. To solve these problems, a refined network structure for SAR vehicle image semantic segmentation, namely, All-Convolutional networks (A-ConvNets)-based Mask (ACM) net, is proposed. The mask in the training dataset of the network is extracted from image reconstruction using the Attribute Scattering Center (ASC) model, which can solve the problem of the lack of manual annotation in the segmentation methods based on deep learning. The proposed ACM Net consists of a modified A-ConvNets-based backbone and two decoupled head branches which achieve target segmentation and label prediction results, respectively. Experiments on moving and stationary target acquisition and recognition (MSTAR) dataset show that the comprehensive segmentation performance of ACM Net is better than both traditional segmentation methods and deep-learning-based segmentation methods. The classification results outperform other instance or semantic segmentation methods with the state-of-the-art recognition accuracy.

An Unambiguous Imaging Method of Moving Target for Maritime Scenes With Spaceborne High-Resolution and Wide-Swath SAR

In azimuth multichannel high-resolution and wide-swath (AMC-HRWS) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system, undersampling of azimuth signal results in the failure of the single-channel echo imaging, so the echoes of all the channels should be reconstructed to obtain the unambiguous SAR image. Many methods have been proposed to reconstruct the stationary scene echoes. However, moving targets (MTs) will cause false targets in the reconstructed SAR image, which has a great influence on SAR image interpretation and moving target detection, especially in maritime scenes. Hence, we propose an unambiguous imaging method of the moving target for maritime scenes with AMC-HRWS SAR. First, azimuth deramp processing is introduced to obtain coarse-focused moving targets, and then their echoes can be extracted from the sea clutter. Based on the extracted data, a radial velocity estimation method is proposed, which is high efficiency and does not require redundant channels. In addition, based on the estimated radial velocity and the characteristics of the coarse-focused signal, a novel signal reconstruction method of moving target is presented. The reconstruction performance of this method is not affected by channel imbalance, and false targets can be removed even if there is radial velocity error. Besides, the effectiveness of this scheme is verified by the simulation data and GaoFen-3 SAR real data. The estimated radial velocities of ships are verified by automatic identification system (AIS) information. The imaging results show that false targets are effectively suppressed, and moving targets are located in correct positions.

Pulse RFI Mitigation in Synthetic Aperture Radar Data via a Three-Step Approach: Location, Notch, and Recovery

In complex electromagnetic environments, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is severely affected by radio frequency interference (RFI) from other systems, such as ground-based radar, cellular networks, and global positioning systems, and this interference cannot be neglected. Pulse RFI (PRFI), a common form of RFI, can hinder SAR signal processing and image interpretation to varying degrees. The time-domain notch filtering method designed for mitigating PRFI can locate and mitigate the evident PRFI covered in SAR echo data, but it is helpless against PRFI hidden in a strong echo signal. In this article, a three-step approach is proposed to tackle the PRFI problem. In the proposed approach, the first step is to detect and locate PRFI; this is based on eigenvalue decomposition (EVD) and the short-time Fourier transform (STFT). The second step is to notch PRFI, and this is based on a time-domain notch filter. The third step is to recover the notched signal using a novel matrix completion strategy, which integrates with a robust low-rank matrix completion (LRMC) technique—i.e.,the singular value thresholding (SVT) algorithm—and a well-known Lagrange interpolation technique. Experimental results via simulated SAR data, Sentinel-1 level-0 raw data, and L-band airborne SAR raw data demonstrate the performance of the proposed approach.