Gradual Domain Adaptation with Pseudo-Label Denoising for SAR Target Recognition When Using Only Synthetic Data for Training

Because of the high cost of data acquisition in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) target recognition, the application of synthetic (simulated) SAR data is becoming increasingly popular. Our study explores the problems encountered when training fully on synthetic data and testing on measured (real) data, and the distribution gap between synthetic and measured SAR data affects recognition performance under the circumstances. We propose a gradual domain adaptation recognition framework with pseudo-label denoising to solve this problem. As a warm-up, the feature alignment classification network is trained to learn the domain-invariant feature representation and obtain a relatively satisfactory recognition result. Then, we utilize the self-training method for further improvement. Some pseudo-labeled data are selected to fine-tune the network, narrowing the distribution difference between the training data and test data for each category. However, the pseudo-labels are inevitably noisy, and the wrong ones may deteriorate the classifier's performance during fine-tuning iterations. Thus, we conduct pseudo-label denoising to eliminate some noisy pseudo-labels and improve the trained classifier's robustness. We perform pseudo-label denoising based on the image similarity to keep the label consistent between the image and feature domains. We conduct extensive experiments on the newly published SAMPLE dataset, and we design two training scenarios to verify the proposed framework. For Training Scenario I, the framework matches the result of neural architecture searching and achieves 96.46% average accuracy. For Training Scenario II, the framework outperforms the results of other existing methods and achieves 97.36% average accuracy. These results illustrate the superiority of our framework, which can reach state-of-the-art recognition levels with appropriate stability.