• Journal of the Korea Institute of Military Science and Technology
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.175-186
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• 2021

In the field of automatic target recognition(ATR) with synthetic aperture radar(SAR) imagery, it is usually impractical to obtain SAR target images covering a full range of aspect views. When the database consists of SAR target images with limited angular diversity, it can lead to performance degradation of the SAR-ATR system. To address this problem, this paper proposes a deep learning-based method where channel attention modules(CAMs) are inserted to a convolutional neural network(CNN). Motivated by the idea of the squeeze-and-excitation(SE) network, the CAM is considered to help improve recognition performance by selectively emphasizing discriminative features and suppressing ones with less information. After testing various CAM types included in the ResNet18-type base network, the SE CAM and its modified forms are applied to SAR target recognition using MSTAR dataset with different reduction ratios in order to validate recognition performance improvement under the limited angular diversity condition.