Athanasios Pantsios | Searcharxiv

arXiv2025

Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning For Efficient SAR Automatic Target Recognition

Synthetic aperture radar automatic target recognition (SAR-ATR) systems have rapidly evolved to tackle incremental recognition challenges in operational settings. Data scarcity remains a major hurdle that conventional SAR-ATR techniques struggle to address. To cope with this challenge, we propose a few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) framework based on a dual-branch architecture that focuses on local feature extraction and leverages the discrete Fourier transform and global filters to capture long-term spatial dependencies. This incorporates a lightweight cross-attention mechanism that fuses domain-specific features with global dependencies to ensure robust feature interaction, while maintaining computational efficiency by introducing minimal scale-shift parameters. The framework combines focal loss for class distinction under imbalance and center loss for compact intra-class distributions to enhance class separation boundaries. Experimental results on the MSTAR benchmark dataset demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in FSCIL SAR-ATR, attesting to its effectiveness in real-world scenarios.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

IncSAR: A Dual Fusion Incremental Learning Framework for SAR Target Recognition

Deep learning techniques have achieved significant success in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) target recognition using predefined datasets in static scenarios. However, real-world applications demand that models incrementally learn new information without forgetting previously acquired knowledge. The challenge of catastrophic forgetting, where models lose past knowledge when adapting to new tasks, remains a critical issue. In this paper, we introduce IncSAR, an incremental learning framework designed to tackle catastrophic forgetting in SAR target recognition. IncSAR combines the power of a Vision Transformer (ViT) and a custom-designed Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) in a dual-branch architecture, integrated via a late-fusion strategy. Additionally, we explore the use of TinyViT to reduce computational complexity and propose an attention mechanism to dynamically enhance feature representation. To mitigate the speckle noise inherent in SAR images, we employ a denoising module based on a neural network approximation of Robust Principal Component Analysis (RPCA), leveraging a simple neural network for efficient noise reduction in SAR imagery. Moreover, a random projection layer improves the linear separability of features, and a variant of Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) decorrelates extracted class prototypes for better generalization. Extensive experiments on the MSTAR, SAR-AIRcraft-1.0, and OpenSARShip benchmark datasets demonstrate that IncSAR significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving a 99.63\% average accuracy and a 0.33\% performance drop, representing an 89\% improvement in retention compared to existing techniques. The source code is available at https://github.com/geokarant/IncSAR.

cs.CV↗