Noise reduction in ISAR imaging of UAVs using weighted atomic norm minimization and 2D-ADMM algorithm

The effect of noise on the Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar (ISAR) with sparse apertures is a challenging issue for image reconstruction with high resolution at low Signal-to-Noise Ratios (SNRs). It is well-known that the image resolution is affected by the bandwidth of the transmitted signal and the Coherent Processing Interval (CPI) in two dimensions, range and azimuth, respectively. To reduce the noise effect and thus increase the two-dimensional resolution of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) images, we propose the Fast Reweighted Atomic Norm Denoising (FRAND) algorithm by incorporating the weighted atomic norm minimization. To solve the problem, the Two-Dimensional Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (2D-ADMM) algorithm is developed to speed up the implementation procedure. Assuming sparse apertures for ISAR images of UAVs, we compare the proposed method with the MUltiple SIgnal Classification (MUSIC), Cadzow, and SL0 methods in different SNRs. Simulation results show the superiority of FRAND at low SNRs based on the Mean-Square Error (MSE), Peak Signal-to-Noise ratio (PSNR) and Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) criteria.

Two-dimensional gridless super-resolution method for ISAR imaging

We are focused on improving the resolution of images of moving targets in Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar (ISAR) imaging. This could be achieved by recovering the scattering points of a target that have stronger reflections than other target points, leading to increasing the higher Radar Cross Section (RCS) of a target. These points, however, are sparse and when the received data is incomplete, moving targets would not be properly recognizable in ISAR images. To increase the resolution in ISAR imaging, we propose the 2-Dimensional Reweighted Trace Minimization (2D-RWTM) method to retrieve frequencies of sparse scattering points in both range and cross-range directions. This method is a gridless super-resolution method, which does not depend on fitting the scattering point on the grids, leading to less complexity compared to the other methods. Using computer simulations, the proposed 2D-RWTM is compared to the Atomic Norm Minimization (ANM) in terms of the Mean Squared Errors (MSE). The results show that using the proposed method, the scattering points of a target are successfully recovered. It is shown that by selecting different weighting matrices and scattering points adjacent to each other, the recovery in ISAR imaging is still successful.