Gaussian meta-feature balanced aggregation for few-shot synthetic aperture radar target detection

Due to the high mobility and strong concealment characteristics of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) targets, the corresponding SAR datasets exhibit few-shot data properties, and there is a significant lack of research on few-shot target detection methods in the SAR domain. Furthermore, this study is subject to the following limitations: the scarcity of SAR data and significant sample variations make it difficult to control class centers using existing methods, and the learned models tend to be biased towards base classes while easily confusing novel classes with base classes. These limitations hinder the generalization of knowledge from base classes when detecting novel class targets. In this work, we propose a novel few-shot SAR target detection method based on Gaussian meta-feature balanced aggregation (GMFBA), which is based on meta-learning. Specifically, we first propose two novel feature aggregation methods with Gaussian metrics, namely Gaussian projection distribution metric (GPDM) and Gaussian kernel mean embedding metric (GKMEM). By estimating class distribution with variational autoencoders to replace traditional class prototypes, we sample from robust distributions and measure projection Wasserstein distance and Gaussian kernel mean embedding distance with prior distributions, obtaining the best robust support features under the optimal measurement results. Then, based on GPDM and GKMEM, we propose a novel balanced inter-class uncorrelated aggregation (BICUA) method, which extracts support features of each class according to the proportion of samples and aggregates them with query features in a balanced manner, promoting feature representation between different classes and ensuring no interference between features to significantly reduce confusion between base classes and novel classes. Specifically, GMFBA outperforms the state-of-the-art method G-FSOD significantly in all settings, achieving state-of-the-art performance. In contrast, the novel class detection performance of GMFBA has shown an average improvement of 8.56% on split1 and split2 of the SRSDD-v1.0 dataset, and an average improvement of 1.41% on split1 and split2 of the MSAR-1.0 dataset. The code is available at https://github.com/Caltech-Z/GMFBA.