Underwater acoustic target recognition is an important aspect of underwater acoustic research. In recent years, machine learning has been developed continuously, which is widely and effectively applied in underwater acoustic target recognition. In order to acquire good recognition results
and reduce the problem of overfitting, Adequate data sets are essential. However, underwater acoustic samples are relatively rare, which has a certain impact on recognition accuracy. In this paper, in addition of the traditional audio data augmentation method, a new method of data augmentation
using generative adversarial network is proposed, which uses generator and discriminator to learn the characteristics of underwater acoustic samples, so as to generate reliable underwater acoustic signals to expand the training data set. The expanded data set is input into the deep neural
network, and the transfer learning method is applied to further reduce the impact caused by small samples by fixing part of the pre-trained parameters. The experimental results show that the recognition result of this method is better than the general underwater acoustic recognition method,
and the effectiveness of this method is verified.