A Hybrid and Explainable Deep Learning Framework for SAR Images

Abstract

Deep learning based patch-wise Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image classification usually requires a large number of labeled data for training. Aiming at understanding SAR images with very limited annotation and taking full advantage of complex-valued SAR data, this paper proposes a general and practical framework for quad-, dual-, and single-polarized SAR data. In this framework, two important elements are taken into consideration: image representation and physical scattering properties. Firstly, a convolutional neural network is applied for SAR image representation. Based on time-frequency analysis and polarimetric decomposition, the scattering labels are extracted from complex SAR data with unsupervised deep learning. Then, a bag of scattering topics for a patch is obtained via topic modeling. By assuming that the generated scattering topics can be regarded as the abstract attributes of SAR images, we propose a soft constraint between scattering topics and image representations to refine the network. Finally, a classifier for land cover and land use semantic labels can be learned with only a few annotated samples. The framework is hybrid for the combination of deep neural network and explainable approaches. Experiments are conducted on Gaofen-3 complex SAR data and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework.