DL-DSFN: Dual-Layer Dynamic Scattering Filtering for Robust SAR Target Recognition

Abstract

Despite the impressive performance of deep learning in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) automatic target recognition (ATR), its generalization capability remains a critical concern, particularly when facing domain shifts between training and testing environments. Considering the inherent robustness and interpretability of electromagnetic scattering characteristics, we explore leveraging these properties to guide deep learning training, thereby improving generalization. To this end, we propose a dual-layer dynamic scattering filtering network (DL-DSFN) that leverages external physical priors to guide the learning process. The first layer adaptively generates convolutional kernels conditioned on scattering cues, enabling localized modeling of target-specific scattering phenomena. The second layer establishes a cross-domain mapping from SAR imagery to scattering features, facilitating automatic extraction of salient scattering characteristics. Furthermore, an adaptive mechanism for determining the number of scattering centers is also incorporated. Experiments conducted under significant variations between training and testing sets demonstrate that our method achieves competitive recognition accuracy while maintaining low computational cost, with only approximately 0.16 M parameters and 0.002 G FLOPs.