Fine-Grained Image Generation Network With Radar Range Profiles Using Cross-Modal Visual Supervision

Electromagnetic imaging methods mainly utilize converted sampling, dimensional transformation, and coherent processing to obtain spatial images of targets, which often suffer from accuracy and efficiency problems. Deep neural network (DNN)-based high-resolution imaging methods have achieved impressive results in improving resolution and reducing computational costs. However, previous works exploit single modality information from electromagnetic data; thus, the performances are limited. In this article, we propose an electromagnetic image generation network (EMIG-Net), which translates electromagnetic data of multiview 1-D range profiles (1DRPs), directly into bird-view 2-D high-resolution images under cross-modal supervision. We construct an adversarial generative framework with visual images as supervision to significantly improve the imaging accuracy. Moreover, the network structure is carefully designed to optimize computational efficiency. Experiments on self-built synthetic data and experimental data in the anechoic chamber show that our network has the ability to generate high-resolution images, whose visual quality is superior to that of traditional imaging methods and DNN-based methods, while consuming less computational cost. Compared with the backprojection (BP) algorithm, the EMIG-Net gains a significant improvement in entropy (72%), peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR; 150%), and structural similarity (SSIM; 153%). Our work shows the broad prospects of deep learning in radar data representation and high-resolution imaging and provides a path for researching electromagnetic imaging based on learning theory.