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Doppler–Kinematic Spatio-Temporal Graph Learning for Low-Slow-Small Target Recognition Using Multi-Dimensional Radar Observations

  • Jia Liu
  • , Xiaolong Chen*
  • , Ningyuan Su
  • , Hongyong Wang
  • , Xinghai Wang
  • , Yong Wang
  • *Corresponding author for this work
  • Naval Aviation University

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Low-slow-small (LSS) target recognition using multi-dimensional radar remains challenging due to weak signatures, similar kinematics, and overlapping short-term Doppler patterns. Digital-array radar provides continuous, complementary Doppler-spectrum and kinematic measurements; however, their heterogeneity in dimension, distribution, and physical meaning often makes direct fusion under-exploit discriminative complementarity and inadequately model temporal track evolution. To address this, we propose a Doppler-Kinematic Spatio-Temporal Graph Learning framework named Dual-Stream Spatio-Temporal Cross-Attention Graph Convolutional Network (DS-STCAGCN) for LSS target recognition using multi-dimensional radar observations. The method separately encodes Doppler-spectrum and kinematic features to preserve their modality-specific characteristics, fuses them through bidirectional cross-attention, captures long-range temporal dependencies via self-attention, and aggregates local frame-to-frame correlations through graph convolution on a time-ordered observation graph. On the public L-band digital-array dataset LSS-DAUR-1.0, DS-STCAGCN achieves 99.73% mean accuracy and maintains 98.64% at 5 dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). On the passive-radar dataset LSS-PR-1.0, it reaches 99.86% mean accuracy, demonstrating strong cross-modal generalization. This work provides an effective spatio-temporal modelling framework for multi-dimensional radar sensing and robust LSS target recognition.

Original languageEnglish
Article number2151
JournalRemote Sensing
Volume18
Issue number13
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 2026

Keywords

  • Doppler–kinematic fusion
  • low-slow-small targets
  • multi-dimensional radar sensing
  • radar target classification
  • spatio-temporal graph neural network

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