SAR-GTR: Attributed Scattering Information Guided SAR Graph Transformer Recognition Algorithm

Utilizing electromagnetic scattering information for SAR data interpretation is currently a prominent research focus in the SAR interpretation domain. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) can effectively integrate domain-specific physical knowledge and human prior knowledge, thereby alleviating challenges such as limited sample availability and poor generalization in SAR interpretation. In this study, we thoroughly investigate the electromagnetic inverse scattering information of single-channel SAR and re-examine the limitations of applying GNNs to SAR interpretation. We propose the SAR Graph Transformer Recognition Algorithm (SAR-GTR). SAR-GTR carefully considers the attributes and characteristics of different electromagnetic scattering parameters by distinguishing the mapping methods for discrete and continuous parameters, thereby avoiding information confusion and loss. Furthermore, the GTR combines GNNs with the Transformer mechanism and introduces an edge information enhancement channel to facilitate interactive learning of node and edge features, enabling the capture of robust and global structural characteristics of targets. Additionally, the GTR constructs a hierarchical topology-aware system through global node encoding and edge position encoding, fully exploiting the hierarchical structural information of targets. Finally, the effectiveness of the algorithm is validated using the ATRNet-STAR large-scale vehicle dataset.

LDSF: Lightweight Dual-Stream Framework for SAR Target Recognition by Coupling Local Electromagnetic Scattering Features and Global Visual Features

Mainstream DNN-based SAR-ATR methods still face issues such as easy overfitting of a few training data, high computational overhead, and poor interpretability of the black-box model. Integrating physical knowledge into DNNs to improve performance and achieve a higher level of physical interpretability becomes the key to solving the above problems. This paper begins by focusing on the electromagnetic (EM) backscattering mechanism. We extract the EM scattering (EMS) information from the complex SAR data and integrate the physical properties of the target into the network through a dual-stream framework to guide the network to learn physically meaningful and discriminative features. Specifically, one stream is the local EMS feature (LEMSF) extraction net. It is a heterogeneous graph neural network (GNN) guided by a multi-level multi-head attention mechanism. LEMSF uses the EMS information to obtain topological structure features and high-level physical semantic features. The other stream is a CNN-based global visual features (GVF) extraction net that captures the visual features of SAR pictures from the image domain. After obtaining the two-stream features, a feature fusion subnetwork is proposed to adaptively learn the fusion strategy. Thus, the two-stream features can maximize the performance. Furthermore, the loss function is designed based on the graph distance measure to promote intra-class aggregation. We discard overly complex design ideas and effectively control the model size while maintaining algorithm performance. Finally, to better validate the performance and generalizability of the algorithms, two more rigorous evaluation protocols, namely once-for-all (OFA) and less-for-more (LFM), are used to verify the superiority of the proposed algorithm on the MSTAR.