Land-Sea Target Detection and Recognition in SAR Image Based on Non-Local Channel Attention Network

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) target recognition is essential for SAR image interpretation. It has been widely used in national defense and national economy. At present, the SAR image detection and recognition methods based on convolutional neural network (CNN) have problems such as insufficient extraction of the feature information of SAR image targets, false targets caused by the interference of complex backgrounds, and low detection performance. The main reason is that the feature extraction of CNN is a local operation in space and time, which ignores the correlation between pixels and regions and the dependencies between channels in SAR images. In this article, a non-local channel attention network (NLCANet) SAR image target recognition method is proposed based on the GoogLeNet structure combined with asymmetric pyramid non-local block (APNB) and squeeze-and-excitation block (SEB). APNB is added to the GoogLeNet framework to capture more context information and enhance the correlation between pixels and regions. SEB is added to the Inception structure to become Inception-SEB (ISEB), through which channel dependencies based on the fusion of different scale features can be obtained. The experimental results based on the moving and stationary target acquisition and recognition (MSTAR) dataset and the SAR ship detection dataset (SSDD) show that the proposed method improves the detection ability of targets in complex backgrounds and achieves better land-sea target recognition performance.