SAR-AE-SFP: SAR Imagery Adversarial Example in Real Physics domain with Target Scattering Feature Parameters

Abstract

Deep neural network-based Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) target recognition models are susceptible to adversarial examples. Current adversarial example generation methods for SAR imagery primarily operate in the 2D digital domain, known as image adversarial examples. Recent work, while considering SAR imaging scatter mechanisms, fails to account for the actual imaging process, rendering attacks in the three-dimensional physical domain infeasible, termed pseudo physics adversarial examples. To address these challenges, this paper proposes SAR-AE-SFP-Attack, a method to generate real physics adversarial examples by altering the scattering feature parameters of target objects. Specifically, we iteratively optimize the coherent energy accumulation of the target echo by perturbing the reflection coefficient and scattering coefficient in the scattering feature parameters of the three-dimensional target object, and obtain the adversarial example after echo signal processing and imaging processing in the RaySAR simulator. Experimental results show that compared to digital adversarial attack methods, SAR-AE-SFP Attack significantly improves attack efficiency on CNN-based models (over 30\%) and Transformer-based models (over 13\%), demonstrating significant transferability of attack effects across different models and perspectives.