Imaging method for co-prime-sampling space-borne sar based on 2D sparse-signal reconstruction

Co-prime-sampling space-borne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) replaces the traditional uniform sampling by performing co-prime sampling in azimuth, which effectively alleviates the conflict between spatial resolution and effective swath width, while also improving the ground detection performance of the SAR system. However, co-prime-sampling in azimuth causes the echo signal to exhibit azimuthal under sampling and non-uniform sampling characteristics, which means the traditional SAR image-processing method can not effectively image co-prime-sampled SAR. In this paper, an imaging method based on Two-Dimensional (2D) sparse-signal reconstruction is proposed for co-prime-sampling space-borne SAR. Using this method, after range-pulse compression, the 2D observed signal is intercepted and a corresponding sparse dictionary consisting of 2D atoms is constructed according to the Doppler parameters of each range gate. Then, azimuth-focus processing is completed by the improved 2D-signal sparsity adaptive matching pursuit algorithm. The proposed method not only compensates for the 2D coupling between the range and azimuth, but also eliminates the influence of space-varying imaging parameters on sparse reconstruction to achieve accurate reconstruction of the entire scene. The simulation results of the point targets and distribution targets verify that the proposed method can effectively reconstruct sparse scenes at a rate much lower than the Nyquist sampling rate. © 2020 Institute of Electronics Chinese Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.