SAR Target Image Generation Method Using Azimuth-Controllable Generative Adversarial Network

TL;DR

This paper introduces an azimuth-controllable GAN that generates accurate SAR target images at intermediate azimuths, addressing data scarcity and enhancing SAR research capabilities.

Contribution

The proposed network uniquely combines azimuth control with high-fidelity SAR image generation, improving over existing methods in accuracy and controllability.

Findings

Generated SAR images have high azimuth accuracy.

The method effectively addresses small sample issues.

Experimental results outperform existing approaches.

Abstract

Sufficient synthetic aperture radar (SAR) target images are very important for the development of researches. However, available SAR target images are often limited in practice, which hinders the progress of SAR application. In this paper, we propose an azimuth-controllable generative adversarial network to generate precise SAR target images with an intermediate azimuth between two given SAR images' azimuths. This network mainly contains three parts: generator, discriminator, and predictor. Through the proposed specific network structure, the generator can extract and fuse the optimal target features from two input SAR target images to generate SAR target image. Then a similarity discriminator and an azimuth predictor are designed. The similarity discriminator can differentiate the generated SAR target images from the real SAR images to ensure the accuracy of the generated, while the azimuth predictor measures the difference of azimuth between the generated and the desired to ensure the azimuth controllability of the generated. Therefore, the proposed network can generate precise SAR images, and their azimuths can be controlled well by the inputs of the deep network, which can generate the target images in different azimuths to solve the small sample problem to some degree and benefit the researches of SAR images. Extensive experimental results show the superiority of the proposed method in azimuth controllability and accuracy of SAR target image generation.