Dual-stream contrastive predictive network with joint handcrafted feature view for SAR ship classification

Abstract: Most existing synthetic aperture radar (SAR) ship classification technologies heavily rely on correctly labeled data, ignoring the discriminative features of unlabeled SAR ship images. Even though researchers try to enrich CNN-based features by introducing traditional handcrafted features, existing methods easily cause information redundancy and fail to capture the interaction between them. To address these issues, we propose a novel dual-stream contrastive predictive network (DCPNet), which consists of two asymmetric task designs and the false negative sample elimination module. The first task is to construct positive sample pairs, guiding the core encoder to learn more general representations. The second task is to encourage adaptive capture of the correspondence between deep features and handcrated features, achieving knowledge transfer within the model, and effectively improving the redundancy caused by the feature fusion. To increase the separability between clusters, we also design a cluster-level tasks. The experimental results on OpenSARShip and FUSAR-Ship datasets demonstrate the improvement in classification accuracy of supervised models and confirm the capability of learning effective representations of DCPNet.