SAR-ESAE: Echo Signal-Guided Adversarial Example Generation Method for Synthetic Aperture Radar Target Detection

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) target detection models are highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks, which significantly reduce detection performance and robustness. Existing adversarial SAR target detection approaches mainly focus on the image domain and neglect the critical role of signal propagation, making it difficult to fully capture the connection between the physical space and the image domain. To address this limitation, we propose an Echo Signal-Guided Adversarial Example Generation method for SAR target detection (SAR-ESAE). The core idea is to embed adversarial perturbations into SAR echo signals and propagate them through the imaging and inverse scattering processes, thereby establishing a unified attack framework across the signal, image, and physical spaces. In this way, perturbations not only appear as pixel-level distortions in SAR images but also alter the scattering characteristics of 3D target models in the physical space. Simulation experiments in the Scenario-SAR dataset demonstrate that the SAR-ESAE method reduces the mean Average Precision of the YOLOv3 model by 23.5% and 8.6% compared to Dpatch and RaLP attacks, respectively. Additionally, it exhibits excellent attack effectiveness in both echo signal and target model attack experiments and exhibits evident adversarial transferability across detection models with different architectures, such as Faster-RCNN and FCOS.