A sea–land clutter classification framework for over-the-horizon radar based on weighted loss semi-supervised generative adversarial network

Deep convolutional neural network has made great achievements in sea–land clutter classification for over-the-horizon radar (OTHR). The premise is that a large number of labeled training samples must be provided for a sea–land clutter classifier. In practical engineering applications, it is relatively easy to obtain label-free sea–land clutter samples. However, the labeling process is extremely cumbersome and requires expertise in the field of OTHR. To solve this problem, we propose an improved generative adversarial network, namely weighted loss semi-supervised generative adversarial network (WL-SSGAN). Specifically, we propose a joint feature matching loss by weighting the middle layer features of the discriminator of semi-supervised generative adversarial network (SSGAN). Furthermore, we propose the weighted loss of WL-SSGAN by linearly weighting the standard adversarial loss of SSGAN and the joint feature matching loss. The classification performance of WL-SSGAN is evaluated on sea–land clutter datasets. The experimental results show that WL-SSGAN can improve the performance of the fully supervised classifier with only a small number of labeled samples by utilizing a large number of unlabeled sea–land clutter samples. Further, the proposed weighted loss is superior to both the adversarial loss and the feature matching loss. Additionally, we compare WL-SSGAN with conventional semi-supervised classification methods and demonstrate that WL-SSGAN achieves the highest classification accuracy.