Dual-band polarimetric HRRP recognition via a brain-inspired multi-channel fusion feature extraction network

Radar high-resolution range profile (HRRP) provides geometric and structural information of target, which is important for radar automatic target recognition (RATR). However, due to the limited information dimension of HRRP, achieving accurate target recognition is challenging in applications. In recent years, with the rapid development of radar components and signal processing technology, the acquisition and use of target multi-frequency and polarization scattering information has become a significant way to improve target recognition performance. Meanwhile, deep learning inspired by the human brain has shown great promise in pattern recognition applications. In this paper, a Multi-channel Fusion Feature Extraction Network (MFFE-Net) inspired by the human brain is proposed for dual-band polarimetric HRRP, aiming at addressing the challenges faced in HRRP target recognition. In the proposed network, inspired by the human brain’s multi-dimensional information interaction, the similarity and difference features of dual-frequency HRRP are first extracted to realize the interactive fusion of frequency features. Then, inspired by the human brain’s selective attention mechanism, the interactive weights are obtained for multi-polarization features and multi-scale representation, enabling feature aggregation and multi-scale fusion. Finally, inspired by the human brain’s hierarchical learning mechanism, the layer-by-layer feature extraction and fusion with residual connections are designed to enhance the separability of features. Experiments on simulated and measured datasets verify the accurate recognition capability of MFFE-Net, and ablative studies are conducted to confirm the effectiveness of components of network for recognition.