Feature Attention Complex-Valued-Based CNN for Ship Target Recognition of SAR Images

The details regarding targets within Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery are typically conveyed and maintained in complex-valued form. Namely, the information regarding both the amplitude and phase is essential. In the process of recognizing targets with SAR, the network only utilizes the amplitude image as input, while the phase information is neglected, resulting in poor recognition performance. This paper proposes a Feature Attention Complex-Valued-Based convolutional neural Network (FACV-Net) for SAR ship recognition to overcome these issues, which effectively utilizes phase information to improve target recognition. Firstly, to meet the requirements of network training in complex domains, a series of complex-valued operation blocks have been constructed. Moreover, a new complex-valued Attention Module (CAM) is introduced to ensure that the network focuses on the amplitude and phase characteristics of the target separately. Additionally, to address the mismatch problem between the amplitude and phase data, two distinct methods for complex-valued max-pooling are utilized. Ultimately, the performance of the proposed FACV-Net is assessed using the OpenSARship dataset, and the results indicate that this novel approach surpasses conventional networks in terms of recognition accuracy. When the CAM is added, the performance of the network sees a further enhancement of around 3% in accuracy. These findings confirm the proposed method’s effectiveness and advantage over others.