Conventional synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems are limited in their ability to satisfy the increasing requirement for improved spatial resolution and wider coverage. The demand for high resolution requires high sampling rates, while coverage is limited by the pulse repetition frequency. Consequently, sampling rate reduction is of high practical value in SAR imaging. In this paper, we introduce a new algorithm, equivalent to the well-known range-Doppler method, to process SAR data using the Fourier series coefficients of the raw signals. We then demonstrate how to exploit the algorithm features to reduce sampling rate in both range and azimuth axes and process the signals at sub-Nyquist rates, by using compressive sensing (CS) tools. In particular, we demonstrate recovery of an image using only a portion of the received signal’s bandwidth and also while dropping a large percentage of the transmitted pulses. The complementary pulses may be used to capture other scenes within the same coherent processing interval. In addition, we propose exploiting the ability to reconstruct the image from narrow bands in order to dynamically adapt the transmitted waveform energy to vacant spectral bands, paving the way to cognitive SAR. The proposed recovery algorithms form a new CS-SAR imaging method that can be applied to high-resolution SAR data acquired at sub-Nyquist rates in range and azimuth. The performance of our method is assessed using simulated and real data sets. Finally, our approach is implemented in hardware using a previously suggested Xampling radar prototype.
A space-variant interpolation is required to compensate for the migration of signal energy through range resolution cells when processing synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data, using either the classical range Doppler (R D) algorithm or related frequency domain techniques. In general, interpolation requires significant computation time, and leads to loss of image quality, especially in the complex image. The new chirp scaling algorithm avoids interpolation, yet performs range cell migration correction accurately. The algorithm requires only complex multiplies and Fourier transforms to implement, is inherently phase preserving, and is suitable for wide-swath, large-beamwidth, and large-squint applications. This paper describes the chirp scaling algorithm, summarizes simulation results, presents imagery processed with the algorithm, and reviews quantitative measures of its performance. Based on quantitative comparison, the chirp scaling algorithm provides image quality equal to or better than the precision range Doppler processor. Over the range of parameters tested, image quality results approach the theoretical limit, as defined by the system bandwidth. > In recent years, compressed sensing (CS) has been applied in the field of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging and shows great potential. The existing models are, however, based on application of the sensing matrix acquired by the exact observation functions. As a result, the corresponding reconstruction algorithms are much more time consuming than traditional matched filter (MF)-based focusing methods, especially in high resolution and wide swath systems. In this paper, we formulate a new CS-SAR imaging model based on the use of the approximated SAR observation deducted from the inverse of focusing procedures. We incorporate CS and MF within an sparse regularization framework that is then solved by a fast iterative thresholding algorithm. The proposed model forms a new CS-SAR imaging method that can be applied to high-quality and high-resolution imaging under sub-Nyquist rate sampling, while saving the computational cost substantially both in time and memory. Simulations and real SAR data applications support that the proposed method can perform SAR imaging effectively and efficiently under Nyquist rate, especially for large scale applications. A novel compressive sensing (CS) algorithm for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging is proposed which is called as the two-dimensional double CS algorithm (2-D-DCSA). We first derive the imaging operator for SAR, which is named as the chirp-scaling operator (CSO), from the chirp-scaling algorithm (CSA), then we show its inverse is a linear map, which transforms the SAR image to the received baseband radar signal. We show that the SAR image can be reconstructed simultaneously in the range and azimuth directions from a small number of the raw data. The proposed algorithm can handle large-scale data because both the CSO and its inverse allow fast matrix-vector multiplications. Both the simulated and real data are processed to test the algorithm and the results show that the 2-D-DCSA can be applied to reconstructing the SAR images effectively with much less data than regularly required.