Physically Consistent Radar High-Resolution Range Profile Generation via Spectral-Aware Diffusion for Robust Automatic Target Recognition Under Data Scarcity
Abstract
High-Resolution Range Profile (HRRP) represents the electromagnetic backscattering distribution of targets and plays a pivotal role in remote-sensing-based Automatic Target Recognition (RATR). However, in non-cooperative sensing scenarios, acquiring sufficient measured data is severely constrained by operational costs and physical limitations, leading to data scarcity that hampers model robustness. To overcome this, we propose SpecM-DDPM, a spectral-aware Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPM) tailored for generating high-fidelity HRRPs that preserve physical scattering properties. Unlike generic generative models, SpecM-DDPM incorporates radar signal physics into the diffusion process. Specifically, a parallel multi-scale block is designed to adaptively capture both local scattering centers and global target resonance structures. To ensure spectral fidelity, a spectral gating mechanism serves as a physics-constrained filter to calibrate the energy distribution in the frequency domain. Furthermore, a Frequency-Aware Curriculum Learning (FACL) strategy is introduced to guide the progressive reconstruction from low-frequency structural components to high-frequency scattering details. Experiments on measured aircraft data demonstrate that SpecM-DDPM generates samples with high physical consistency, significantly enhancing the generalization performance of radar recognition systems in data-limited environments.
Fields of Study & Subjects
Advanced SAR Imaging Techniques
Radar Systems and Signal Processing
Microwave Imaging and Scattering Analysis
Publication details
- Journal / source
- Remote Sensing
- Publisher
- MDPI AG
- Volume
- 18
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 316–316
- Publication date
- 16 January 2026
- Language
- EN