SAR Target Image Generation Method Using Azimuth-Controllable Generative Adversarial Network

Sufficient synthetic aperture radar (SAR) target images are very important for the development of research works. However, available SAR target images are often limited in practice, which hinders the progress of SAR application. In this article, we propose an azimuth-controllable generative adversarial network to generate precise SAR target images with an intermediate azimuth between two given SAR images' azimuths. This network mainly contains three parts: 1) generator, 2) discriminator, and 3) predictor. Through the proposed specific network structure, the generator can extract and fuse the optimal target features from two input SAR target images to generate an SAR target image. Then, a similarity discriminator and an azimuth predictor are designed. The similarity discriminator can differentiate the generated SAR target images from the real SAR images to ensure the accuracy of the generated while the azimuth predictor measures the difference of azimuth between the generated and the desired to ensure the azimuth controllability of the generated. Therefore, the proposed network can generate precise SAR images, and their azimuths can be controlled well by the inputs of the deep network, which can generate the target images in different azimuths to solve the small sample problem to some degree and benefit the research works of SAR images. Extensive experimental results show the superiority of the proposed method in azimuth controllability and accuracy of SAR target image generation.