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Multi-Center Prototype Feature Distribution Reconstruction for Class-Incremental SAR Target Recognition

Ke Zhang,Bin Wu,Peng Li,Zhi Kang,Lin Zhang

Published 2026 in Italian National Conference on Sensors

ABSTRACT

In practical applications of deep learning-based Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) systems, new target categories emerge continuously. This requires the systems to learn incrementally—acquiring new knowledge while retaining previously learned information. To mitigate catastrophic forgetting in Class-Incremental Learning (CIL), this paper proposes a CIL method for SAR ATR named Multi-center Prototype Feature Distribution Reconstruction (MPFR). It has two core components. First, a Multi-scale Hybrid Attention feature extractor is designed. Trained via a feature space optimization strategy, it fuses and extracts discriminative features from both SAR amplitude images and Attribute Scattering Center data, while preserving feature space capacity for new classes. Second, each class is represented by multiple prototypes to capture complex feature distributions. Old class knowledge is retained by modeling their feature distributions through parameterized Gaussian diffusion, alleviating feature confusion in incremental phases. Experiments on public SAR datasets show MPFR achieves superior performance compared to existing approaches, including recent SAR-specific CIL methods. Ablation studies validate each component’s contribution, confirming MPFR’s effectiveness in addressing CIL for SAR ATR without storing historical raw data.

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