End-to-End SAR Deep Learning Imaging Method Based on Sparse Optimization

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging has developed rapidly in recent years. Although the traditional sparse optimization imaging algorithm has achieved effective results, its shortcomings are slow imaging speed, large number of parameters, and high computational complexity. To solve the above problems, an end-to-end SAR deep learning imaging algorithm is proposed. Based on the existing SAR sparse imaging algorithm, the SAR imaging model is first rewritten to the SAR complex signal form based on the real-value model. Second, instead of arranging the two-dimensional echo data into a vector to continuously construct an observation matrix, the algorithm only derives the neural network imaging model based on the iteration soft threshold algorithm (ISTA) sparse algorithm in the two-dimensional data domain, and then reconstructs the observation scene through the superposition and expansion of the multi-layer network. Finally, through the experiment of simulation data and measured data of the three targets, it is verified that our algorithm is superior to the traditional sparse algorithm in terms of imaging quality, imaging time, and the number of parameters.

MTRC-Tolerated Multi-Target Imaging Based on 3D Hough Transform and Non-Equal Sampling Sparse Solution

Distributed radar array brings several new forthcoming advantages in aerospace target detection and imaging. The two-dimensional distributed array avoids the imperfect motion compensation in coherent processing along slow time and can achieve single snapshot 3D imaging. Some difficulties exist in the 3D imaging processing. The first one is that the distributed array may be only in small amount. This means that the sampling does not meet the Nyquist sample theorem. The second one refers to echoes of objects in the same beam that will be mixed together, which makes sparse optimization dictionary too long for it to bring the huge computation burden in the imaging process. In this paper, we propose an innovative method on 3D imaging of the aerospace targets in the wide airspace with sparse radar array. Firstly, the case of multiple targets is not suitable to be processed uniformly in the imaging process. A 3D Hough transform is proposed based on the range profiles plane difference, which can detect and separate the echoes of different targets. Secondly, in the subsequent imaging process, considering the non-uniform sparse sampling of the distributed array in space, the migration through range cell (MTRC)-tolerated imaging method is proposed to process the signal of the two-dimensional sparse array. The uniformized method combining compressed sensing (CS) imaging in the azimuth direction and matched filtering in the range direction can realize the 3D imaging effectively. Before imaging in the azimuth direction, interpolation in the range direction is carried out. The main contributions of the proposed method are: (1) echo separation based on 3D transform avoids the huge amount of computation of direct sparse optimization imaging of three-dimensional data, and ensures the realizability of the algorithm; and (2) uniformized sparse solving imaging is proposed, which can remove the difficulty cause by MTRC. Simulation experiments verified the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method.

An Inexact Penalty Decomposition Method for Sparse Optimization

The penalty decomposition method is an effective and versatile method for sparse optimization and has been successfully applied to solve compressed sensing, sparse logistic regression, sparse inverse covariance selection, low rank minimization, image restoration, and so on. With increase in the penalty parameters, a sequence of penalty subproblems required being solved by the penalty decomposition method may be time consuming. In this paper, an acceleration of the penalty decomposition method is proposed for the sparse optimization problem. For each penalty parameter, this method just finds some inexact solutions to those subproblems. Computational experiments on a number of test instances demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method in accurately generating sparse and redundant representations of one-dimensional random signals.