A staked discriminative auto-encoder based on center loss for radar target HRRP recognition

Abstract In the radar automatic target recognition filed, extracting representative features from the radar high resolution range profile (HRRP) is the key issues, which determines the accuracy and reliability of radar target recognition. In this paper, we propose a novel stacked discriminative auto-encoder(S-disAE), the center loss is integrated into auto-encoder, it can force the learned feature with large distance close to their class feature representation center, so as to reduce the intra-class variations while keeping the features of different classes separable. In pre-training stage of our discriminative auto-encoder(disAE), we combine the mean square error loss and center loss to learn the main factors of input raw data and minimize the intra-class variations of the feature, in fine-tuning stage, we also combine the softmax cross entropy loss and center loss to improve the classification accuracy. We conduct several experiments on the simulated HRRP data, the results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can extract discriminant features and improve the HRRP recognition accuracy.