Relation-Guided Embedding Transductive Propagation Network with Residual Correction for Few-Shot SAR ATR

Deep learning-based methods have shown great promise for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) automatic target recognition (ATR) in recent years. These methods demonstrate superior performance compared to traditional approaches across various recognition tasks. However, these methods often face significant challenges due to the limited availability of labeled samples, which is a common issue in SAR image analysis owing to the high cost and difficulty of data annotation. To address this issue, a variety of few-shot learning approaches have been proposed and have demonstrated promising results under data-scarce conditions. Nonetheless, a notable limitation of many existing few-shot methods is that their performance tends to plateau when more labeled samples become available. Most few-shot methods are optimized for scenarios with extremely limited data. As a result, they often fail to leverage the advantages of larger datasets. This leads to suboptimal recognition performance compared to conventional deep learning techniques when sufficient training data is available. Therefore, there is a pressing need for approaches that not only excel in few-shot scenarios but also maintain robust performance as the number of labeled samples increases. To this end, we propose a novel method, termed relation-guided embedding transductive propagation network with residual correction (RGE-TPNRC), specifically designed for few-shot SAR ATR tasks. By leveraging mechanisms such as relation node modeling, relation-guided embedding propagation, and residual correction, RGE-TPNRC can fully utilize limited labeled samples by deeply exploring inter-sample relations, enabling better scalability as the support set size increases. Consequently, it effectively addresses the plateauing performance problem of existing few-shot learning methods when more labeled samples become available. Firstly, input samples are transformed into support-query relation nodes, explicitly capturing the dependencies between support and query samples. Secondly, the known relations among support samples are utilized to guide the propagation of embeddings within the network, enabling manifold smoothing and allowing the model to generalize effectively to unseen target classes. Finally, a residual correction propagation classifier refines predictions by correcting potential errors and smoothing decision boundaries, ensuring robust and accurate classification. Experimental results on the moving and stationary target acquisition and recognition (MSTAR) and OpenSARShip datasets demonstrate that our method can achieve state-of-the-art performance in few-shot SAR ATR scenarios.