Narrowband Interference Separation for Synthetic Aperture Radar via Sensing Matrix Optimization-Based Block Sparse Bayesian Learning

High-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) operating with a large bandwidth is subject to impacts from various kinds of narrowband interference (NBI) in complex electromagnetic environments. Recently, many radio frequency interference (RFI) suppression approaches for SAR based on sparse recovery have been proposed and demonstrated to outperform traditional ones in preserving the signal of interest (SOI) while suppressing the interference by exploiting their intrinsic structures. In particular, the joint recovery strategy of SOI and NBI with a cascaded dictionary, which eliminates the steps of NBI reconstruction and time-domain cancellation, can further reduce unnecessary system complexity. However, these sparsity-based approaches hardly work effectively for signals from an extended target or NBI with a certain bandwidth, since neither of them is sparse in a prescient domain. Moreover, sub-dictionaries corresponding to different components in the cascaded matrix are not strictly independent, which severely limits the performance of separated reconstruction. In this paper, we present an enhanced NBI separation algorithm for SAR via sensing matrix optimization-based block sparse Bayesian learning (SMO-BSBL) to solve these problems above. First, we extend the block sparse Bayesian learning framework to a complex-valued domain for the convenience of radar signal processing with lower computation complexity and modify it to deal with the separation problem of NBI in the contaminated echo. For the sake of improving the separated reconstruction performance, we propose a new block coherence measure by defining the external and internal block structure, which is used for optimizing the observation matrix. The optimized observation matrix is then employed to reconstruct SOI and NBI simultaneously under the modified BSBL framework, given a known and fixed cascaded dictionary. Numerical simulation experiments and comparison results demonstrate that the proposed SMO-BSBL is effective and superior to other advanced algorithms in NBI suppression for SAR.