Physics-Driven SAR Target Detection: A Review and Perspective

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is highly valuable for target detection due to its all-weather, day-night operational capability and certain ground penetration potential. However, traditional SAR target detection methods often directly adapt algorithms designed for optical imagery, simplistically treating SAR data as grayscale images. This approach overlooks SAR’s unique physical nature, failing to account for key factors such as backscatter variations from different polarizations, target representation changes across resolutions, and detection threshold shifts due to clutter background heterogeneity. Consequently, these limitations lead to insufficient cross-polarization adaptability, feature masking, and degraded recognition accuracy due to clutter interference. To address these challenges, this paper systematically reviews recent research advances in SAR target detection, focusing on physical constraints including polarization characteristics, scattering mechanisms, signal-domain properties, and resolution effects. Finally, it outlines promising research directions to guide future developments in physics-aware SAR target detection.