HRRP Target Recognition With Deep Transfer Learning

Recently, radar high-resolution range profile (HRRP) recognition based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) has received considerable attention due to its robustness to translation and amplitude changes. Most of the existing methods require that sufficient labeled data with complete aspect angles be used as training data, which is a difficult task in practice. In addition, HRRP signals have a high sensitivity to the aspect angle. Therefore, the representative and discriminative powers of the features extracted from typical CNN models are reduced due to incomplete aspect angles in the training data, which significantly limit the recognition performance. This paper first considers the problem of HRRP recognition with incomplete aspect angle training data and addresses the problem by a deep transfer learning framework. Specifically, the two proposed methods enhance the recognition performance by exploring the discriminative power and the intraclass consistency with auxiliary data, which have HRRP signals with complete aspect angles. This paper generates a simulated HRRP dataset from public data to validate the proposed work. The comparisons of the recognition results demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms the latest CNN-based models.