# Fifty Years of SAR Automatic Target Recognition: The Road Forward

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22159 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22159/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 26 Sep 2025.

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [FUSAR-KLIP: Towards Multimodal Foundation Models for Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23927/) (2025)
- [SAM Guided Semantic and Motion Changed Region Mining for Remote Sensing Change Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21420/) (2025)
- [HuiYanEarth-SAR: A Foundation Model for High-Fidelity and Low-Cost Global Remote Sensing Imagery Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11444/) (2026)
- [Light-ResKAN: A Parameter-Sharing Lightweight KAN with Gram Polynomials for Efficient SAR Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01903/) (2026)
- [ProSR: Semantic-Prototype-Guided Discrete Modeling for Physically Consistent SAR Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.02377/) (2026)
- [Cross-modal learning for SAR target recognition using optical vision foundation models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.07753/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imaging is capable of observing objects in nearly all weather and illumination conditions, and has become an indispensable means of information acquisition for analysis and recognition of objects and scenes. SAR Automatic Target Recognition (SAR ATR) has been one of the most fundamental and challenging problems in remote sensing image analysis. Nowadays, the artificial intelligence (AI) technology, represented by large models and AI agents, has transformed the research paradigm, profoundly influenced various research fields, and continues to evolve at an unprecedented pace. However, the huge potential of AI for SAR image analysis remains locked. To unlock the potential of AI in SAR image understanding, the research community should rethink how to enable bidirectional empowerment between AI and SAR image understanding and strive to achieve substantial breakthroughs at critical bottlenecks. Given this period of remarkable evolution, this paper offers the first comprehensive review of SAR ATR, tracing its development and milestones over the past five decades and providing the research community with a clear roadmap. This survey includes approximately 260 research contributions, covering critical aspects of SAR ATR: pivotal challenges, important datasets, the merits and limitations of representative methods, evaluation metrics, and state-of-the-art performance. Finally, we finish the survey by identifying promising directions for future research. Looking ahead, we call for significant attention on three fundamental pillars: the curation of high-quality large-scale datasets, the design of fair and comprehensive evaluation benchmarks, and the fostering of safe open-source ecosystems.