Achieving High-Accuracy Target Recognition Using Few ISAR Images via Multi-Prototype Network with Attention Mechanism

Inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) is a significant means of detection in space of non-cooperative targets, which means that the imaging geometry and associated parameters between the ISAR platform and the detection targets are unknown. In this way, a large number of ISAR images for high-accuracy target recognition are difficult to obtain. Recently, prototypical networks (PNs) have gained considerable attention as an effective method for few-shot learning. However, due to the specificity of the ISAR imaging mechanism, ISAR images often have unknown range and azimuth distortions, resulting in a poor imaging effect. Therefore, this condition poses a challenge for a PN to represent a class through a prototype. To address this issue, we use a multi-prototype network (MPN) with attention mechanism for ISAR image target recognition. The use of multiple prototypes eases the uncertainty associated with the fixed structure of a single prototype, enabling the capture of more comprehensive target information. Furthermore, to maximize the feature extraction capability of MPN for ISAR images, this method introduces the classical convolutional block attention module (CBAM) attentional mechanism, where CBAM generates attentional feature maps along channel and spatial dimensions to generate multiple robust prototypes. Experimental results demonstrate that this method outperforms state-of-the-art few-shot methods. In a four-class classification task, it achieved a target recognition accuracy of 95.08%, representing an improvement of 9.94–17.49% over several other few-shot approaches.