Complex input convolutional neural networks for wide angle SAR ATR

Abstract

To date, automatic target recognition (ATR) techniques in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery have largely focused on features that use only the magnitude part of SAR's complex valued magnitude-plus-phase history. While such techniques are often very successful, they inherently ignore the significant amount of discriminatory information available in the phase. This paper describes a method for exploiting the complex information for ATR by using a convolutional neural network (CNN) that accepts fully complex input features. We show a performance leap from 87.30% to 99.21% accuracy on real collected wide-angle SAR data with the use of complex features.