Target Recognition in Infrared Circumferential Scanning System via Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

With an infrared circumferential scanning system (IRCSS), we can realize long-time surveillance over a large field of view. Recognizing targets in the field of view automatically is a crucial component of improving environmental awareness under the trend of informatization, especially in the defense system. Target recognition consists of two subtasks: detection and identification, corresponding to the position and category of the target, respectively. In this study, we propose a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN)-based method to realize the end-to-end target recognition in the IRCSS. Existing DCNN-based methods require a large annotated dataset for training, while public infrared datasets are mostly used for target tracking. Therefore, we build an infrared target recognition dataset to both overcome the shortage of data and enhance the adaptability of the algorithm in various scenes. We then use data augmentation and exploit the optimal cross-domain transfer learning strategy for network training. In this process, we design the smoother L1 as the loss function in bounding box regression for better localization performance. In the experiments, the proposed method achieved 82.7 mAP, accomplishing the end-to-end infrared target recognition with high effectiveness on accuracy.