Semantic-Layout-Guided Image Synthesis for High-Quality Synthetic-Aperature Radar Detection Sample Generation

Abstract

With the widespread application and functional complexity of deep neural networks (DNNs), the demand for training samples is increasing. This elevated requirement also extends to DNN-based SAR object detection. Most public SAR object detection datasets are oriented to marine targets such as ships, while data sets oriented to land targets are relatively rare, though they are an effective way to improve the land object detection capability of deep models through SAR sample generation. In this paper, a synthesis generation collaborative SAR sample augmentation framework is proposed to achieve flexible and diverse high-quality sample augmentation. First, a semantic-layout-guided image synthesis strategy is proposed to generate diverse detection samples. The issues of object location rationality and object layout diversity are also addressed. Meanwhile, a pix2pixGAN network guided by layout maps is utilized to achieve diverse background augmentation. Second, a progressive training strategy of diffusion models is proposed to achieve semantically controllable SAR sample generation to further improve the diversity of scene clutter. Finally, a sample cleaning method considering distribution migration and network filtering is employed to further improve the quality of detection samples. The experimental results show that this semantic synthesis generation method can outperform existing sample augmentation methods, leading to a comprehensive improvement in the accuracy metrics of classical detection networks.