Convolutional Neural Network Based on Feature Decomposition for Target Detection in SAR Images

Most high-resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images of real-life scenes are complex due to clutter, such as grass, trees, roads, and buildings, in the background. Traditional target detection algorithms for SAR images contain numerous false and missed alarms due to such clutter, adversely affecting the performance of SAR images target detection. Herein we propose a feature decomposition-based Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for target detection in SAR images. The feature extraction module first extracts features from the input images, and these features are then decomposed into discriminative and interfering features using the feature decomposition module. Furthermore, only the discriminative features are input into the multiscale detection module for target detection. The interfering features that are removed after feature decomposition are the parts that are unfavorable to target detection, such as complex background clutter, whereas the discriminative features that are retained are the parts that are favorable to target detection, such as the targets of interest. Hence, an effective reduction in the number of false and missed alarms, as well as an improvement in the performance of SAR target detection, is achieved. The F1-score values of the proposed method are 0.9357 and 0.9211 for the MiniSAR dataset and SAR Aircraft Detection Dataset (SADD), respectively. Compared to the single shot multibox detector without the feature extraction module, the F1-score values of the proposed method for the MiniSAR and SADD datasets show an improvement of 0.0613 and 0.0639, respectively. Therefore, the effectiveness of the proposed method for target detection in SAR images of complex scenes was demonstrated through experimental results based on the measured datasets.