Polarimetric Scattering-Structure Contrastive Learning for Few-Shot HRRP Recognition

High-resolution range profiles (HRRPs) provide compact radar target representations but exhibit strong aspect sensitivity, complicating class-incremental recognition when historical data are unavailable. Changes in viewing aspect shift scattering-peak locations and amplitudes, while reflector groups may produce responses resembling ships. Existing dynamic expansion methods can also incur substantial parameter and memory overhead. To address these challenges, we propose P-SER, a Physical Consistency-Constrained Scattering Expandable Representation framework for exemplar-free class-incremental HRRP recognition. P-SER reconstructs dominant scattering points from complex-valued sum- and azimuth-difference-channel HRRPs and observation geometry. The reconstructed spatial structure, target extent, and energy distribution are used to derive class-level scattering prototypes and sample-level saliency priors, providing physically grounded constraints for feature learning and old-class knowledge retention. A primitive scatterer dictionary further characterizes local strong-scattering mechanisms and calibrates uncertain ship--reflector predictions at inference. Meanwhile, lightweight residual adapters are incrementally introduced into a shared HRRP backbone to learn new classes with limited model growth. Experiments on simulated and measured HRRP datasets show that P-SER delivers competitive recognition performance without retaining old-class exemplars, while maintaining physical consistency, interference robustness, knowledge retention, and model scalability.

We revisit High-Resolution Range Profile (HRRP) classification with aspect-angle conditioning. While prior work often assumes that aspect-angle information is incomplete during training or unavailable at inference, we study a setting where angles are available for all training samples and explicitly provided to the classifier. Using three datasets and a broad range of conditioning strategies and model architectures, we show that both single-profile and sequential classifiers benefit consistently from aspect-angle awareness, with an average accuracy gain of about 7% and improvements of up to 10%, depending on the model and dataset. In practice, aspect angles are not directly measured and must be estimated. We show that a causal Kalman filter can estimate them online with a median error of 5{\textdegree}, and that training and inference with estimated angles preserves most of the gains, supporting the proposed approach in realistic conditions.

Few-shot classifiers of rock thin sections are meta-trained on many rock types that a petrographer has identified slide by slide, and this identification is the costly step that new collections lack. We study few-shot recognition of unseen rock types when no training slide is identified, and the only information available is what the microscope records anyway: which slide an image comes from, and whether it was taken in plane-polarized (PPL) or cross-polarized (XPL) light. We first show why generic unsupervised pseudo-tasks fit this setting poorly: the positives they find without labels are either wrong or near-duplicates of the anchor, so they teach the model little. Polarized-light microscopy provides positives that avoid both problems. The PPL and XPL views of one field show the same grains, so they are correct by construction, yet they look very different. We propose cross-polarization pairing (XPP), which treats each slide as a pseudo-class and pairs its PPL and XPL views of the same field location, so that matching must rely on grain shape and texture rather than on colour. On the Nanjing University collection of 108 rock types, with support and query images taken from different slides, XPP is the best label-free method on average over three random splits, and matches a supervised model trained on 78 identified rock types. Controls show that colour augmentation and other acquisition positives do not reproduce the gain. We also show that the image-level protocol of earlier work is saturated, and propose a cross-slide protocol in its place.