  Vehicle recognition is a fundamental problem in SAR image interpretation.
However, robustly recognizing vehicle targets is a challenging task in SAR due
to the large intraclass variations and small interclass variations.
Additionally, the lack of large datasets further complicates the task. Inspired
by the analysis of target signature variations and deep learning
explainability, this paper proposes a novel domain alignment framework named
the Hierarchical Disentanglement-Alignment Network (HDANet) to achieve
robustness under various operating conditions. Concisely, HDANet integrates
feature disentanglement and alignment into a unified framework with three
modules: domain data generation, multitask-assisted mask disentanglement, and
domain alignment of target features. The first module generates diverse data
for alignment, and three simple but effective data augmentation methods are
designed to simulate target signature variations. The second module
disentangles the target features from background clutter using the
multitask-assisted mask to prevent clutter from interfering with subsequent
alignment. The third module employs a contrastive loss for domain alignment to
extract robust target features from generated diverse data and disentangled
features. Lastly, the proposed method demonstrates impressive robustness across
nine operating conditions in the MSTAR dataset, and extensive qualitative and
quantitative analyses validate the effectiveness of our framework.
