Airborne sparse flight array SAR 3D imaging based on compressed sensing in frequency domain

Abstract

In airborne array synthetic aperture radar (SAR), the three-dimensional (3D) imaging performance and cross-track resolution depends on the length of the equivalent array. In this paper, Barker sequence criterion is used for sparse flight sampling of airborne array SAR, in order to obtain high cross-track resolution in as few times of flights as possible. Under each flight, the imaging algorithm of back projection (BP) and the data extraction method based on modified uniformly redundant arrays (MURAs) are utilized to obtain complex 3D image pairs. To solve the side-lobe noise in images, the interferometry between each image pair is implemented, and compressed sensing (CS) reconstruction is adopted in the frequency domain. Furthermore, to restore the geometrical relationship between each flight, the phase information corresponding to negative MURA is compensated on each single-pass image reconstructed by CS. Finally, by coherent accumulation of each complex image, the high resolution in cross-track direction is obtained. Simulations and experiments in X-band verify the availability.