Physics inspired hybrid attention for SAR target recognition

There has been a recent emphasis on integrating physical models and deep neural networks (DNNs) for SAR target recognition, to improve performance and achieve a higher level of physical interpretability. The attributed scattering center (ASC) parameters garnered the most interest, being considered as additional input data or features for fusion in most methods. However, the performance greatly depends on the ASC optimization result, and the fusion strategy is not adaptable to different types of physical information. Meanwhile, the current evaluation scheme is inadequate to assess the model's robustness and generalizability. Thus, we propose a physics inspired hybrid attention (PIHA) mechanism and the once-for-all (OFA) evaluation protocol to address the above issues. PIHA leverages the high-level semantics of physical information to activate and guide the feature group aware of local semantics of target, so as to re-weight the feature importance based on knowledge prior. It is flexible and generally applicable to various physical models, and can be integrated into arbitrary DNNs without modifying the original architecture. The experiments involve a rigorous assessment using the proposed OFA, which entails training and validating a model on either sufficient or limited data and evaluating on multiple test sets with different data distributions. Our method outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches in 12 test scenarios with same ASC parameters. Moreover, we analyze the working mechanism of PIHA and evaluate various PIHA enabled DNNs. The experiments also show PIHA is effective for different physical information. The source code together with the adopted physical information is available at https://github.com/XAI4SAR/PIHA.