SAR Target Classification with CycleGAN Transferred Simulated Samples

Target classification is an important part in automatic target recognition (ATR) systems. Deep learning methods get state of the art performance in SAR target classification. Simulation is a useful data augmentation method when the numbers of real samples for training is not sufficient. This article discusses how to release the full potential of simulated samples which is used to improve performance of SAR target classifier. The proposed method is based on cycle adversarial network (CycleGAN), which can transfer simulated samples to be more similar with real samples in image domain. Experiments show that adding simulated samples straightforward into training dataset is not helpful to improve the performance. However, adding the transferred simulated samples for training results in about 10% increase in accuracy in the designed SAR airplane classification experiment, compared with training without data augmentation.