DESPECKLING BASED DATA AUGMENTATION

APPROACH IN DEEP LEARNING BASED

RADAR TARGET CLASSIFICATION
S. H. Mert Ceylan, Isin Erer
Electronics and Communication Department
Istanbul Technical University
IGARSS 2022 - 2022 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium | 978-1-6654-2792-0/22/$31.00 ©2022 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/IGARSS46834.2022.9884098

Istanbul, Turkey
Email: ceylans17@itu.edu.tr, ierer@itu.edu.tr

Abstract—Speckle noise in SAR images distorts the image
of the target and its surroundings, making difficult the target
recognition task. Therefore, decomposition process of the speckle
noise from the SAR images is important for radar automatic
target recognition applications. Besides since the succes of the
deep networks depends on the amount of data used in the training
stage data augmentation increases classification rates. In this
study, a new data augmentation approach based on despeckling
has been proposed rather than the classical data augmentation
techniques used in the processing of natural images in order
to increase the deep learning-based radar target classification
performance. Edge Avoiding Wavelet filter is used for speckle re-
duction task. Classification performances for original, despeckled
and despeckling based data augmented datasets are compared
on two traditional and basic CNN models. The experimental
results show that despeckling based data augmentation method
can improve the deep learning based radar automatic target
recognition classification performance.
Keywords—deep learning; automatic target recognition; de-
speckling; data augmentation.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Radar systems are preferred instead of optical systems since
they are not affected by weather conditions and can work
day and night. Nowadays, SAR imaging systems are used in
researches in many fields such as environment, geology, and
archeology. [1]
Besides the advantages of radar imaging techniques, radar
images are corrupted by speckle noise, which is inherent in
the nature of radar images and reduces the quality of the
image. Thus, making the classification difficult for both human
users and automatic target recognition applications. Therefore,
reducing the noise prior to the classification is important. Many
studies have been carried out in the literature in order to
improve the images by removing the speckle noise from the
SAR images.In [2], in the first step, the algorithm tries to
match and group blocks that similar to the reference region
in the noisy image according to the threshold values. Then, it
tries to combine all the blocks together to form 3D cylinder-
like shapes and filtering is performed for each block group. In
BM3D, hard thresholding and Wiener filtering is performed.
In [3], a CNN network is proposed to remove the speckle noise
from the noisy image.
Automatic object recognition applications in radar images
have been carried out by many researchers using different
methods. Im [4], PCA and ICA were used for feature extrac-
tion and KNN, LDC, QDC and DVM classifiers were used
for classification and their performances were compared using
8-class MSTAR dataset. In [5], classification was performed
with AdaBoost (Adaptive Boosting) in the 3-class MSTAR
dataset. Apart from these, the detection of the coastline in [6]
has been studied, noise has been removed with a wavelet-based
preprocessing and classification has been made with Support
Vector Machines.
In recent years, deep learning-based automatic target recog-
nition applications have been used in many SAR classification
studies. A basic CNN with 3 convolution, 2 max pooling and
1 dense layer is established in [7] to classify SAR images
using 10-class MSTAR dataset. Also, in [8] a simple and
different CNN is established. Different than the other studies,
not only the MSTAR image, but also the additional radar-
related informations such as phase informations were taken
into account for classification. In [9], the transfer learning
method is applied. Pretrained AlexNet model is used as feature
extracto followed by SVM for classification. In [10] and
[11], deeper and well-known CNNs are established. In [10],
ResNet-18 network and classical data augmentation methods
are introduced to classify SAR images and in [11] VGG-16
network is used for radar automatic target recognition.
In this paper, we investigate the impact of despeckling based
data augmentation on the classification performances. Rather
than classical data augmentation techniques such as cropping,
rotating, flipping and adding noise, the data is despeckled and
2 CNN architectures designed for this study are trained with
the augmented dataset composed of original and despeckled
data.
The paper is organized as follows. Section II introduces the
Edge Avoiding Wavelet filter [12] which is used to despeckling
the SAR images in this work. Section III describes the details
of despeckling and despeckling based data augmentation pro-

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 cesses and also traditional ConvNets used for classification.
Experimental results are given in Section IV and conclusions
are given in Section V.

II. D ESPECKLING WITH E DGE AVOIDING WAVELET

Smoothing process is performed using à trous wavelet
transform by a convolution between the input image I and
Fig. 1. Model 1 architecture
bicubic spline filter h where W[I] is the output of the EAW
filter given as
1X 2) Model 2: Model 2, which is a more basic than Model
W [I] = h(q)cσ r (p, q)Iq (1) 1, is taken and implemented from [7] paper published in the
k
q∈S
years when ultra-deep and complex networks such as ResNet
At this point, p and q are the pixel and neighbouring and GoogLeNet were just beginning to be introduced.
pixel locations, respectively. h(q) represents the bicubic spline
filter and the Gaussian kernel is represented as σr . Here, the
normalization parameter and Gaussian kernel can be described
as
X
k= h(q)cσ r (p, q) (2)
q∈S

1 [I]2p + [I]2q Fig. 2. Model 2 architecture

cσ r (p, q) = 2
exp(− (3)
σr σr2
The smoothed image by EAW will be obtained as the output
of this filter. To continue the decomposition process, h is
extended by filling 2.(i-1) zeros between the initial entries and
doubling the Gaussian kernel parameter (σr ) at each level l.
Thus, at ith level the output filter can be written as
1X
W i [I]p = hi−1 (q)cσ r (p, q)i−1 [I]q (4)
k
q∈S
The detail layer (DET [I]) of the image at the level i, can
be found by subtracting the two adjacent filtering outputs.
DET i [I] = W i−1 [I] − W i [I] (5)
III. P ROPOSED METHOD
Speckle noise in SAR images is decomposed from the
SAR image using the EAW filter shared in Section II. Then,
as a data augmentation method, the training images of the
dataset obtained after despeckling process are combined with
the training images from the original MSTAR dataset. This
doubles the size of the training dataset. At this point, no
processing is applied to the test set. Then, two different basic
and traditional Convolutional Neural Networks are built as
detailed in following part of this section. These CNNs are
trained with the original, despeckled and augmented datasets
under the same conditions. Their classification performances
are evaluated at last.
1) Model 1: Model 1 can be described as a LeNet-5 [13]
version that is modern and relatively larger in terms of number
IV. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS
A. MSTAR Dataset
The dataset used in this study was created by Sandia Na-
tional Laboratory (SNL) in January 1998 within the MSTAR
(Moving and Stationary Target Acquisition and Recognition)
program supported by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency) and AFRL (Airforce Research Laboratory).
Within the scope of this program, hundreds of thousands of
SAR images were collected for multiple target types with
different aspect, depression angles and serial numbers, and few
of them were made available to researchers on the internet.
[14] In this dataset, there are 10 classes in total (Figure 3),
such as armored personnel carriers, tanks, and trucks. Images
of these objects were collected on the X band SAR sensor
using spotlight mode in the range of 0◦ to 360◦ . There is a
depression angle difference between the images in the training
and test set, the images for the datasets were collected with 17◦
for training and 15◦ for test set. These are 128x128 grayscale
images.
The information of the original and despeckling based
augmented datasets are as shared in Table I.
Dataset Training Test Total
Original 2747 2425 5172
Augmented 5494 2425 7919
TABLE I. N UMBER OF IMAGES BEFORE AND AFTER DATA
AUGMENTATION

of layers and parameters. In this model, average pooling layers

are replaced by maximum pooling layers and also a dropout
layer is added. Architecture of Model 1 is shown in Figure 1.

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 (a) (b)

(c) (d)
Fig. 3. MSTAR target radar and optical sample images

B. Classification Results
To investigate the impact of despeckling first denoising
is used as a prepocessing step, then it is used as a data
augmentation tool.
1) Despeckling results: Both models were trained using the
original and despeckled images under the same conditions. (e) (f)
Then, the classification performances were compared. In ad-
dition to the EAW filter for despeckling, the Median filter,
which is one of the most basic denosing methods, and the
BM3D filter, which is one of the filters frequently used in
many areas due to its success in despeckling, were also used
for comparison. Furthermore, σr value, which is the only input
of the EAW filter, is altered during the despeckling process to
optimize the despeckling performance of the EAW filter.
Despeckling with Median, BM3D and EAW filters has been (g) (h)
found to increase the classification performance in general. No
Fig. 4. MSTAR image comparison (a) Original , (b) EAW filter σ = 0.004,
improvement was observed for the Median filter only in Model (c) EAW filter σ = 0.006, (d) EAW filter σ = 0.008, (e) EAW filter σ = 0.010,
1 after despeckling. After despeckling process, the highest (f) EAW filter σ = 0.020, (g) Median filter , (h) BM3D filter
classification performance was achieved with σ=0.008 of the
EAW filter. The BM3D filter, which has been reported to
work successfully in most applications, has also significantly
not improve the classification performance for Model 2. This
increased the classification performance of the both deep
can be explained by the generalization ability of Model 2. At
learning based radar target classifiers.
this point, it is necessary to consider the number of parameters
and dropout layer differences between the two models. It is
known that, dropout layer is an efficient regularizer technique
to prevent overfitting and forces a neural network to learn
2) Despeckling based data augmentation results: Median, more robust and useful features. On the other hand, an average
BM3D and EAW filters are applied on the training set and classification success rate of %99.30 was achieved with the
the resulting images are added to the training set of the EAW filter in Model 1, which is a very small model compared
original images to augment the dataset. Then, Model 1 and to the models used today. Additionally, it was observed that
Model 2 have trained with these augmented datasets and the despeckling based data augmentation with the BM3D
classification results are evaluated. After data augmentation, filter achieves a success rate of %98.96 and outperforms the
classification performance of both models greatly increased for classification result obtained with despeckling by BM3D. Also
EAW filter’s σr = 0.010 value. However, the data augmentation for Model 2, the classification accuracy improved from the
by BM3D and the EAW filter with other values of σr does %91,96 to %95.07 with the EAW filter after data augmenta-

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 CNN Model Dataset Accuracy
augmenting the data by adding the despeckled images to
Model 1 Original %98,43
Model 1 Median %98,05 original data set. In order to despeckle the image, in this
Model 1 BM3D %98,72 work EAW filter is preferred because of it’s basic algorithm
Model 1 EAW σ = 0.004 %98,47 and the easy to optimize input parameter by changing the
Model 1 EAW σ = 0.006 %98,67 σr value. Additionally, Median and BM3D filters are also
Model 1 EAW σ = 0.008 %98,92 used in order to compare the results with EAW filter. Both
Model 1 EAW σ = 0.010 %98,47 despeckled and despeckling based data augmentation datasets
Model 1 Original + Median %98,67
Model 1 Original + BM3D %98,96
are used to train two different simple Convolutional Neural
Model 1 Original + EAW σ = 0.004 %98,88 Networks under the same conditions. Experimental results
Model 1 Original + EAW σ = 0.006 %99,30 shows that despeckling based data augmentation with EAW
Model 1 Original + EAW σ = 0.008 %99,25 filter improves the classification performance for deep learning
Model 1 Original + EAW σ = 0.010 %99,25 based automatic radar target recognition systems and also quite
TABLE II. C LASSIFICATION RESULTS FOR M ODEL 1 simple architectures combined with the proposed approach
outperform more complex and deeper structures.
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V. C ONCLUSION
A new data augmentation approach is presented in this
paper. Rather than the classical data augmentation methods
like cropping, flipping, scaling or adding noise, we propose

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