Complex-valued Convolutional Neural Network Enhanced Radar Imaging

Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have been successfully employed to tackle several remote sensing tasks such as image classification and show better performance than previous techniques. For the radar imaging community, a natural question is: Can CNN be introduced to radar imaging and enhance its performance? The presented letter give an affirmative answer to this question. We firstly propose a processing framework by which CNN is used to enhance radar imaging. Then the core module of this framework, the complex-valued CNN (CCNN), is comprehensively derived. Special activation functions are also introduced to the proposed CCNN. Subsequently, the training-data-generation module is shown and some implementation details are presented. Finally, simulations and experiments are carried out. Both results show the superiority of the proposed method on imaging quality and efficiency.