Radar Intelligent Detection with Coarse-Grained Labels

Abstract

Many deep learning based radar target detectors rely on range-cell level labels for training, which are expensive to obtain. To reduce the labeling burden, this paper presents a training strategy that uses only range-window level labels. Specifically, two sub-echoes are randomly cropped from the same window echo, resulting in a known relative shift between them. A siamese Transformer is then used to identify target-salient responses from one sub-echo and form pseudo labels, which are mapped to the paired sub-echo according to the known shift. In addition, a shift-equivariant consistency (SEC) constraint is imposed to align the predicted responses of the two sub-echoes after shift compensation. By exploiting shift priors within each labeled window, the proposed approach learns reliable detection without requiring cell-level labels. Experimental results show that it consistently surpasses classical constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detectors and achieves performance close to range-cell level labels training, while substantially reducing labeling cost.