An Incremental SAR Target Recognition Framework via Memory-Augmented Weight Alignment and Enhancement Discrimination

Synthetic aperture radar automatic target recognition (SAR ATR) is one of the most important research directions in SAR image interpretation. While much existing research into SAR ATR has focused on deep learning technology, an equally important yet underexplored problem is its deployment in incremental learning (IL) scenarios. This letter proposes a new benchmark approach, termed memory augmented weights alignment and enhancement discrimination IL (MEDIL) algorithm to address this issue. First, the attention mechanism is employed as part of the benchmark. Next, we discuss the problem of height deviation of weights at the fully connected layer and design a more suitable alignment of weights by guiding the memory module for contextual data processing. In addition, we leverage the incremental progressive sampling strategy to alleviate the imbalance between old and new classes during the training period. Finally, we propose to enhance the distinction among various classes with an angular penalty loss function to ensure the diversity of incremental instances. The proposed method is evaluated on moving and stationary target acquisition and recognition (MSTAR) and OpenSARShip under different experimental settings. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approach can effectively solve catastrophic forgetting in SAR multiclass recognition problems.