Improved SAR feature fusion with convolutional neural networks and
moment methods
Abstract
Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is an important means of obtaining
battlefield information. Correct identification of SAR images is
essential. Hence, we propose a new method of SAR image recognition based
on multi-feature fusion. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are based
on local pixels and fuse this information at deep layers to obtain deep
features. The moment method focuses on the entire image and obtains
global moment features of different orders. We fuse the two feature
types and choose a suitable feature fusion. First, we propose a
Q_sigmoid function to enhance SAR image contrast, and then we separate
the target area and remove noise interference. Next, we design a
convolutional neural network to obtain the deep features of the target
from the separated image. Then, we use four moment methods to produce
the moment features of the image and sort them according to recognition
rate. Finally, the above features are fused and sorted according to
recognition rate to find the optimal combination. The recognition rate
of our optimal fusion is 98.63%, which is 2.77% higher than is
obtained by CNNs and 6.32% higher than moment methods.