Abstract
Deep learning models have been used recently for target recognition from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. However, the performance of these models tends to deteriorate when only a small number of training samples are available due to the problem of overfitting. To address this problem, we propose a two-stage multiscale densely connected convolutional neural networks (TMDC-CNNs). In the proposed TMDC-CNNs, the overfitting issue is addressed with a novel multiscale densely connected network architecture and a two-stage loss function, which integrated the cosine similarity with the prevailing softmax cross-entropy loss. Experiments were conducted on the MSTAR data set, and the results show that our model offers significant recognition accuracy improvements as compared with other state-of-the-art methods, with severely limited training data. The source codes are available at https://github.com/Stubsx/TMDC-CNNs .