A Review of the Autoencoder and Its Variants: A Comparative Perspective from Target Recognition in Synthetic-Aperture Radar Images

In recent years, unsupervised feature learning based on a neural network architecture has become a hot new topic for research 1-4. The revival of interest in such deep networks can be attributed to the development of efficient optimization skills, by which the model parameters can be optimally estimated 5. The milestone work done by Hinton and Salakhutdinov 6 proposes to initialize the weights that allow deep autoencoder networks to learn low-dimensional codes. The encoding trick introduced works much better than principal component analysis (PCA) in terms of dimension reduction.