SPHR-SAR-Net: Superpixel High-resolution SAR Imaging Network Based on Nonlocal Total Variation

High-resolution is a key trend in the development of synthetic aperture radar (SAR), which enables the capture of fine details and accurate representation of backscattering properties. However, traditional high-resolution SAR imaging algorithms face several challenges. Firstly, these algorithms tend to focus on local information, neglecting non-local information between different pixel patches. Secondly, speckle is more pronounced and difficult to filter out in high-resolution SAR images. Thirdly, the process of high-resolution SAR imaging generally involves high time and computational complexity, making real-time imaging difficult to achieve. To address these issues, we propose a Superpixel High-Resolution SAR Imaging Network (SPHR-SAR-Net) for rapid despeckling in high-resolution SAR mode. Based on the concept of superpixel techniques, we initially combine non-convex and non-local total variation as compound regularization. This approach more effectively despeckles and manages the relationship between pixels while reducing bias effects caused by convex constraints. Subsequently, we solve the compound regularization model using the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) algorithm and unfold it into a Deep Unfolded Network (DUN). The network's parameters are adaptively learned in a data-driven manner, and the learned network significantly increases imaging speed. Additionally, the Deep Unfolded Network is compatible with high-resolution imaging modes such as spotlight, staring spotlight, and sliding spotlight. In this paper, we demonstrate the superiority of SPHR-SAR-Net through experiments in both simulated and real SAR scenarios. The results indicate that SPHR-SAR-Net can rapidly perform high-resolution SAR imaging from raw echo data, producing accurate imaging results.

A novel TomoSAR imaging method with few observations based on nested array

Synthetic aperture radar tomography (TomoSAR) baseline optimization technique is capable of reducing system complexity and improving the temporal coherence of data, which has become an important research in the field of TomoSAR. In this paper, we propose a nested TomoSAR technique, which introduces the nested array into TomoSAR as the baseline configuration. This technique obtains uniform and continuous difference co-array through nested array to increase the degrees of freedom (DoF) of the system and expands the virtual aperture along the elevation direction. In order to make full use of the difference co-array, covariance matrix of the echo needs to be obtained. Therefore, we propose a TomoSAR sparse reconstruction algorithm based on nested array, which uses adaptive covariance matrix estimation to improve the estimation performance in complex scenes. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method through simulated and real data experiments. Compared with traditional TomoSAR and coprime TomoSAR, the imaging results of our proposed method have a better anti-noise performance and retain more image information.