Bayes-SAR net: Robust SAR image classification with uncertainty estimation using Bayesian convolutional neural network

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image classification is a challenging problem due to the complex imaging mechanism as well as the random speckle noise, which affects radar image interpretation. Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been shown to outperform previous state-of-the-art techniques in computer vision tasks owing to their ability to learn relevant features from the data. However, CNNs in particular and neural networks, in general, lack uncertainty quantification and can be easily deceived by adversarial attacks. This paper proposes Bayes-SAR Net, a Bayesian CNN that can perform robust SAR image classification while quantifying the uncertainty or confidence of the network in its decision. Bayes-SAR Net propagates the first two moments (mean and covariance) of the approximate posterior distribution of the network parameters given the data and obtains a predictive mean and covariance of the classification output. Experiments, using the benchmark datasets Flevoland and Oberpfaffenhofen, show superior performance and robustness to Gaussian noise and adversarial attacks, as compared to the SAR-Net homologue. Bayes-SAR Net achieves a test accuracy that is around 10% higher in the case of adversarial perturbation (levels ≽ 0.05).