Deep Learning for Target Classification from SAR Imagery: Data Augmentation and Translation Invariance

This report deals with translation invariance of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for automatic target recognition (ATR) from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. In particular, the translation invariance of CNNs for SAR ATR represents the robustness against misalignment of target chips extracted from SAR images. To understand the translation invariance of the CNNs, we trained CNNs which classify the target chips from the MSTAR into the ten classes under the condition of with and without data augmentation, and then visualized the translation invariance of the CNNs. According to our results, even if we use a deep residual network, the translation invariance of the CNN without data augmentation using the aligned images such as the MSTAR target chips is not so large. A more important factor of translation invariance is the use of augmented training data. Furthermore, our CNN using augmented training data achieved a state-of-the-art classification accuracy of 99.6%. These results show an importance of domain-specific data augmentation.