How SAR Image Denoise Affects the Performance of DCNN-Based Target Recognition Method

Currently, deep neural networks have been widely used in the field of SAR target recognition. Many researchers found that deep neural networks have an ability of denoising. In many cases, there is no need to denoise in pre-process. But the denoising ability of deep neural networks can take place of conventional denoising algorithm or not is doubtful. In this article, we explore the effect of image denoising algorithms to SAR target recognition methods based on deep neural networks. Firstly, seven traditional denoising algorithms are selected to process two SAR datasets. And these data are utilized to train two kinds of deep neural networks. After comparing and analyzing the training processes and results, we find that 1) The effect of denoising algorithms is influenced by architectures of neural networks and quality of datasets. It is difficult to find a SAR image denoising algorithm, which can improve the accuracy of any recognition network. Sometimes they even drag down the performance of recognition networks. 2) The deep networks with more layers will have better denoising ability, so the effect of denoising algorithms will decrease. For ResNet, there is no need to add the denoising processing.