Feature-Fused SAR Target Discrimination Using Multiple Convolutional Neural Networks

Target discrimination has been one of the hottest issues in the interpretation of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. However, the presence of speckle noise and the absence of robust features make SAR discrimination difficult to deal with. Recently, convolutional neural network has obtained state-of-the-art results in pattern recognition. In this letter, we propose a target discrimination framework that jointly uses intensity and edge information of SAR images. This framework contains three parts, namely, feature extraction block, feature fusion block, and final classification block. In addition, a novel feature fusion method that can preserve the spatial relationship of different features is introduced. Experimental results on the miniSAR data demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.