The convolutional neural network (CNN) is widely used in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) target recognition, but conventional CNN mainly adopts a single-scale convolutional kernel, resulting in losing part of the feature information of targets and does not pay enough attention to significant features. On the other hand, conventional CNN approaches only assign fine-class labels to SAR targets, ignoring the high-level semantics information of similar categories, which reduces the feature differences between categories and the generalization ability of the model. Therefore, this paper proposes a multi-scale attention super-class CNN (MSA-SCNN) for SAR target classification. Firstly, MSA-SCNN combines multi-scale feature fusion with the attention module to improve the integrity of SAR target feature representation. The attention module includes channel and spatial attention modules, which realize the weighted enhancement of different scale features. Additionally, MSA-SCNN introduces super-class labels to increase the feature difference between categories. The classification stage consists of a fine-class branch and a super-class branch, and the features trained on the superclass branch are fused to the fine-class branch to improve the network's fine classification ability. Experiments on the moving and stationary target acquisition and recognition (MSTAR) dataset and the FUSAR-Ship dataset show that the proposed MSA-SCNN outperforms many current existing state-of-the-art methods.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.