High-Resolution Fully Polarimetric ISAR Imaging Based on Compressive Sensing

A 2-D range/cross-range radar image of a target is always sparse since only a few strong scattering centers occupy the whole image plane, and thus, it is quite suitable to apply the compressive sensing (CS) theory to obtain inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) images. In this paper, a novel fully polarimetric ISAR imaging method based on CS is proposed. First, a definition of joint sparsity is given by exploiting the scattering characteristics of a target in fully polarimetric channels. Then, fully polarimetric ISAR images are constructed by means of the sparse recovery algorithm under the constraint of the joint sparsity. This proposed imaging method combines the merits of a full-polarization technique and CS theory, and hence, it has two main advantages: 1) it can provide high-resolution ISAR images with limited measurements, which is a promising technique for reducing data storage; 2) it generates fully polarimetric ISAR images with the number and the positions of the scattering centers aligned in polarimetric channels, which allows for further polarimetric scattering characteristic analysis. Finally, both simulation and experimental results are shown to demonstrate the validity of the proposed approach.