Extraction and Mitigation of Radio Frequency Interference Artifacts Based on Time-Series Sentinel-1 SAR Data

Radio frequency interference (RFI) is a critical issue for accurate remote sensing by synthetic aperture radar (SAR). Existing literature mainly detects and mitigates RFI in the raw data domain, which is generally not accessible to the end-user. In this article, a novel RFI extraction and mitigation scheme in the image domain is proposed using multitemporal analysis of SAR images. By exploiting the coupling correlation and complementary information among the time-series images, the background landscape could be modeled as relatively stationary with the low-rank property. Meanwhile, the radiometric artifacts corresponding to RFI could be well extracted and characterized by the sparse components. Extraction and mitigation of RFI signatures could be achieved simultaneously via a joint iterative optimization process. Experimental results on typical real-measured Sentinel-1 datasets acquired in different regional areas with various RFI types demonstrate the validity of the proposed method.