Guiding the underwater acoustic target recognition with interpretable contrastive learning

Recognizing underwater targets from acoustic signals is a challenging task owing to the intricate ocean environments and variable underwater channels. While deep learning-based systems have become the mainstream approach for underwater acoustic target recognition, they have faced criticism for their lack of interpretability and weak generalization performance in practical applications. In this work, we apply the class activation mapping (CAM) to generate visual explanations for the predictions of a spectrogram-based recognition system. CAM can help to understand the behavior of recognition models by highlighting the regions of the input features that contribute the most to the prediction. Our explorations reveal that recognition models tend to focus on the low-frequency line spectrum and high-frequency periodic modulation information of underwater signals. Based on the observation, we propose an interpretable contrastive learning (ICL) strategy that employs two encoders to learn from acoustic features with different emphases (line spectrum and modulation information). By imposing constraints between encoders, the proposed strategy can enhance the generalization performance of the recognition system. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed contrastive learning approach can improve the recognition accuracy and bring significant improvements across various underwater databases.