Integrated Physically Interpretable Model for SAR Target Recognition: Unified Fusion of Electromagnetic and Deep Features

Abstract

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) target recognition has been a prominent research topic in the field of remote sensing image processing. Traditional methods can extract physical features for SAR target recognition, but they are often time-consuming. Deep learning-based methods can learn representative features, but they often operate as black boxes and lack interpretability. This letter introduces an integrated physically interpretable model (IPIM) for SAR target recognition, which unifies electromagnetic and deep learning features. Our method is an integrative model built with an end-to-end mechanism, achieving promising performance and high time efficiency. Specifically, our method employs a deep-unfolding network to learn physical features by incorporating the generative process of complex SAR images. Additionally, a feature fusion module is designed to combine physical features, which reflect local target characteristics, with deep features that capture global information. Experimental results on a measured SAR image dataset demonstrate that our method effectively learns physical features and achieves high performance in target recognition.