SAR Target Detection Network via Semi-supervised Learning

The current Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) target detection methods based on Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) rely on a large amount of slice-level labeled train samples. However, it takes a lot of labor and material resources to label the SAR images at slice-level. Compared to label samples at slice-level, it is easier to label them at image-level. The image-level label indicates whether the image contains the target of interest or not. In this paper, a semi-supervised SAR image target detection method based on CNN is proposed by using a small number of slice-level labeled samples and a large number of image-level labeled samples. The target detection network of this method consists of region proposal network and detection network. Firstly, the target detection network is trained using the slice-level labeled samples. After training convergence, the output slices constitute the candidate region set. Then, the image-level labeled clutter samples are input into the network and then the negative slices of the output are added to the candidate region set. Next, the image-level labeled target samples are input into the network as well. After selecting the positive and negative slices in the output of the network, they are added to the candidate region set. Finally, the detection network is trained using the updated candidate region set. The processes of updating candidate region set and training detection network alternate until convergence. The experimental results based on the measured data demonstrate that the performance of the proposed method is similar to the fully supervised training method using a much larger set of slice-level samples.