Pattern statistics network for classification of high-resolution SAR images

Abstract

The classification of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is of great importance for rapid scene understanding. Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been applied to the classification of single-polarized SAR images. However, it is still difficult due to the random and complex spatial patterns lying in SAR images, especially in the case of finite training data. In this paper, a pattern statistics network (PSNet) is proposed to address this problem. PSNet borrows the idea from the statistics and probability theory and explicitly embeds the random nature of SAR images in the representation learning. In the PSNet, both fluctuation and pattern representations are extracted for SAR images. More specifically, the fluctuation representation does not consider the rigorous relationships between local pixels and only describes the average fluctuation of local pixels. By contrast, the pattern representation is devoted to hierarchically capturing the interactions between local pixels, namely, the spatial patterns of SAR images. The proposed PSNet is evaluated on three real SAR data, including spaceborne and airborne data. The experimental results indicate that the fluctuation representation is useful and PSNet achieves superior performance in comparison with related CNN-based and texture-based methods.