Deep Learning of Raw Radar Echoes for Target Recognition

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) based classification approaches are commonly used methods for automatic target recognition. However, SAR imaging requires complex two-dimensional matched filtering and interpolation algorithms. In this paper, we propose deep learning technology for automatic target recognition based on raw radar echoes instead of SAR images. A modern convolutional neural network (CNN) model is trained directly by radar-echo training data set, and is evaluated on the testing data set. The experimental results show that the proposed method could achieve high accuracy and efficiency for the target recognition.