  Without sufficient data, the quantity of information available for supervised
training is constrained, as obtaining sufficient synthetic aperture radar (SAR)
training data in practice is frequently challenging. Therefore, current SAR
automatic target recognition (ATR) algorithms perform poorly with limited
training data availability, resulting in a critical need to increase SAR ATR
performance. In this study, a new method to improve SAR ATR when training data
are limited is proposed. First, an embedded feature augmenter is designed to
enhance the extracted virtual features located far away from the class center.
Based on the relative distribution of the features, the algorithm pulls the
corresponding virtual features with different strengths toward the
corresponding class center. The designed augmenter increases the amount of
information available for supervised training and improves the separability of
the extracted features. Second, a dynamic hierarchical-feature refiner is
proposed to capture the discriminative local features of the samples. Through
dynamically generated kernels, the proposed refiner integrates the
discriminative local features of different dimensions into the global features,
further enhancing the inner-class compactness and inter-class separability of
the extracted features. The proposed method not only increases the amount of
information available for supervised training but also extracts the
discriminative features from the samples, resulting in superior ATR performance
in problems with limited SAR training data. Experimental results on the moving
and stationary target acquisition and recognition (MSTAR), OpenSARShip, and
FUSAR-Ship benchmark datasets demonstrate the robustness and outstanding ATR
performance of the proposed method in response to limited SAR training data.
