A Comprehensive Survey on SAR ATR in Deep-Learning Era

Due to the advantages of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), the study of Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) has become a hot topic. Deep learning, especially in the case of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), works in an end-to-end way and has powerful feature-extracting abilities. Thus, researchers in SAR ATR also seek solutions from deep learning. We review the related algorithms with regard to SAR ATR in this paper. We firstly introduce the commonly used datasets and the evaluation metrics. Then, we introduce the algorithms before deep learning. They are template-matching-, machine-learning- and model-based methods. After that, we introduce mainly the SAR ATR methods in the deep-learning era (after 2017); those methods are the core of the paper. The non-CNNs and CNNs, that is, those used in SAR ATR, are summarized at the beginning. We found that researchers tend to design specialized CNN for SAR ATR. Then, the methods to solve the problem raised by limited samples are reviewed. They are data augmentation, Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), electromagnetic simulation, transfer learning, few-shot learning, semi-supervised learning, metric leaning and domain knowledge. After that, the imbalance problem, real-time recognition, polarimetric SAR, complex data and adversarial attack are also reviewed. The principles and problems of them are also introduced. Finally, the future directions are conducted. In this part, we point out that the dataset, CNN architecture designing, knowledge-driven, real-time recognition, explainable and adversarial attack should be considered in the future. This paper gives readers a quick overview of the current state of the field.