Few-shot target detection in SAR imagery via intensive meta-feature aggregation

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) targets often exhibit characteristics such as high mobility and strong concealment, resulting in scarce SAR data and the manifestation of few-shot data properties. These few-shot SAR targets are susceptible to interference from complex background information and mutual interference of target features, making it challenging to distinguish SAR targets from the background. Additionally, there is confusion in features among different targets, leading to models being highly insensitive to few-shot SAR targets under complex distribution conditions in new tasks. Similarly, these few-shot SAR targets exhibit significant sample scarcity and sample variations, resulting in pronounced fluctuations in class centers and difficulty in determining sample distributions. This leads to challenges in accurately representing the potential representative features of few-shot SAR targets by the model. To address these issues, further enhancement of SAR target features is necessary to provide a robust foundation for the ultimate aggregation module. Therefore, based on the meta-learning paradigm, we propose a method for few-shot target detection in SAR imagery via intensive meta-feature aggregation (IMFA), aiming to reinforce SAR target features for improved representation. Specifically, firstly, we propose a novel hierarchical multi-head cross attention (HMCA) to capture global multiscale contextual information in different subspaces and analyze representative features between different targets to distinguish SAR targets from the background. Then, based on HMCA, we introduce a novel feature coupling module (FCM) to couple support features with cognitive information from the query image on the support branch. This is done to reduce the confusion and mutual interference of features between targets while enhancing the model's generalization ability on new tasks. Finally, on the support branch with query-aware information, we construct a Gaussian distribution to estimate the class distribution of few-shot SAR targets and replace traditional class prototypes. On this basis, we propose the feature information maximization module (FIMM) to avoid feature information shift, greatly strengthening the expression of potential features. Through these steps, reinforced meta-features can be obtained, enabling efficient aggregation. Experiments on the SRSDD-v1.0 and MSAR-1.0 datasets demonstrate that our method has consistently outperformed state-of-the-art approaches in all configurations, achieving state-of-the-art performance.