Predicting gradient is better: Exploring self-supervised learning for SAR ATR with a joint-embedding predictive architecture

The growing Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data can build a foundation model using self-supervised learning (SSL) methods, which can achieve various SAR automatic target recognition (ATR) tasks with pretraining in large-scale unlabeled data and fine-tuning in small-labeled samples. SSL aims to construct supervision signals directly from the data, minimizing the need for expensive expert annotation and maximizing the use of the expanding data pool for a foundational model. This study investigates an effective SSL method for SAR ATR, which can pave the way for a foundation model in SAR ATR. The primary obstacles faced in SSL for SAR ATR are small targets in remote sensing and speckle noise in SAR images, corresponding to the SSL approach and signals. To overcome these challenges, we present a novel joint-embedding predictive architecture for SAR ATR (SAR-JEPA) thatleverages local masked patches to predict the multi-scale SAR gradient representations of an unseen context. The key aspect of SAR-JEPA is integrating SAR domain features to ensure high-quality self-supervised signals as target features. In addition, we employ local masks and multi-scale features to accommodate various small targets in remote sensing. By fine-tuning and evaluating our framework on three target recognition datasets (vehicle, ship, and aircraft) with four other datasets as pretraining, we demonstrate its outperformance over other SSL methods and its effectiveness as the SAR data increases. This study demonstrates the potential of SSL for the recognition of SAR targets across diverse targets, scenes, and sensors. Our codes and weights are available in https://github.com/waterdisappear/SAR-JEPA . • A large-scale pretraining is performed for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. • We propose a joint-embedding predictive architecture (SAR-JEPA) for speckle noise. • SAR-JEPA performs better than recent methods in small-sample classification tasks. • SAR-JEPA shows improved performance with increasing data volume.