SC-DVNet: A Dual-Branch Recognition Network for Synthetic Aperture Radar Images Based on Scattering Features

Ship classification using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images is a crucial component in marine monitoring. With the rise of deep neural networks (DNN), the abstract feature maps obtained by CNN-based methods have significantly improved classification performance. However, most current DNN-based methods are predominantly inherited from optical imagery, designed only for SAR intensity images, which may present challenges for further improving recognition performance. Therefore, this paper proposes using the point Scattering Center (SC) model for scattering feature extraction combined with graph convolutional networks for ship classification tasks. Comprehensive ablation experiments were carried out to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach. Finally, experimental results on OpenSARShip1.0 dataset verify that the performance of the suggested approach notably outperforms DNN-driven techniques.