Angle-Controllable SAR Image Generation and Target Recognition via StyleGAN2

Due to the inherent characteristics of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging, variations in target orientation, and the challenges posed by non-cooperative targets (i.e., targets without cooperative transponders or external markers), limited viewpoint coverage results in a small-sample problem that severely constrains the application of deep learning to SAR image interpretation and target recognition. To address this issue, this paper proposes a multi-target, multi-view SAR image generation method based on conditional information and StyleGAN2, designed to generate high-quality, angle-controllable SAR images of typical targets from limited samples. The proposed framework consists of an angle encoder, a generator, and a discriminator. The angle encoder employs a sinusoidal encoding scheme that combines sine and cosine functions to address the discontinuity inherent in one-hot angle encoding, thereby enabling precise angle control. Moreover, the integration of SimAM and IAAM attention mechanisms enhances image quality, facilitates accurate angle control, and improves the network’s generalization to untrained angles. Experiments conducted on a self-constructed dataset of typical civilian targets and the SAMPLE subset of the MSTAR dataset demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing baselines in terms of structural fidelity and feature distribution consistency. The generated images achieve a minimum FID of 6.541 and a maximum MS-SSIM of 0.907, while target recognition accuracy improves by 6.03% and 7.14%, respectively. These results validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach for SAR image generation and target recognition tasks.