High Resolution SAR Image Classification with Deeper Convolutional Neural Network

Deeper architectures are proven to be beneficial for the classification performance obviously in computer vision field. Inspired by this, deep CNN s are expected to make progress in the SAR target classification problem as well. However, it is hard to train deeper CNNs for SAR images. Such CNNs have millions of parameters to be determined in the network (for example the VGGNet has more than 130 million parameters), hence large-scale dataset is indispensable when training a deep CNN. But there is no large-scale annotated SAR target dataset, and data acquisition and annotation is much more costly for SAR images. With inadequate data, the network is easy to be overfitting. Several methods based on deep learning have been proposed for SAR image classifications, but they cannot get rid of the aforementioned data limitation of labelled SAR images. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a microarchitecture called CompressUnit (CU). With CU, we design a deeper CNN. Compared with the network with the fewest parameters for SAR image classification in literature so far, our network is 2X deeper with only about 10% of parameters. In this way, we get a deeper network with much fewer parameters. This network is easier to be trained with limited SAR data and is more likely to get rid of overfitting.

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