CDBA-GAN: A Conditional Dual-Branch Attention Generative Adversarial Network for Robust Sonar Image Generation
Wanzeng Kong, Han Mo Yang, Mingyang Jia, Zhe Chen · Applied Sciences · 2025
The acquisition of real-world sonar data necessitates substantial investments of manpower, material resources, and financial capital, rendering it challenging to obtain sufficient authentic samples for sonar-related research tasks. Consequently, sonar image simulation technology has become increasingly vital in the field of sonar data analysis. Traditional sonar simulation methods predominantly focus on low-level physical modeling, which often suffers from limited image controllability and diminished fidelity in multi-category and multi-background scenarios. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a Conditional Dual-Branch Attention Generative Adversarial Network (CDBA-GAN). The framework comprises three key innovations: The conditional information fusion module, dual-branch attention feature fusion mechanism, and cross-layer feature reuse. By integrating encoded conditional information with the original input data of the generative adversarial network, the fusion module enables precise control over the generation of sonar images under specific conditions. A hierarchical attention mechanism is implemented, sequentially performing channel-level and pixel-level attention operations. This establishes distinct weight matrices at both granularities, thereby enhancing the correlation between corresponding elements. The dual-branch attention features are fused via a skip-connection architecture, facilitating efficient feature reuse across network layers. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed CDBA-GAN generates condition-specific sonar images with a significantly lower Fréchet inception distance (FID) compared to existing methods. Notably, the framework exhibits robust imaging performance under noisy interference and outperforms state-of-the-art models (e.g., DCGAN, WGAN, SAGAN) in fidelity across four categorical conditions, as quantified by FID metrics.