Target-Aware Recurrent Attentional Network for Radar HRRP Target Recognition

In this paper, we develop a Target-Aware Recurrent Attentional Network (TARAN) for Radar Automatic Target Recognition (RATR) based on High-Resolution Range Profile (HRRP) to make use of the temporal dependence and find the informative areas in HRRP, since it reflects the distribution of scatterers in target along the range dimension. Specifically, we utilize RNN to explore the sequential relationship between the range cells within a HRRP sample and employ the attention mechanism to weight up each timestep in the hidden state so as to discover the target area, which is more discriminative and informative. Effectiveness and efficiency are evaluated on the measured data. Compared with traditional methods, besides the competitive recognition performance, TARAN is also more robust to time-shift sensitivity thanks to the memory function of RNN and attention mechanism. Furthermore, detailed analysis of TARAN model are provided based on time domain and spectrogram features.