Four-Dimensional SAR Sparse Imaging Using
Bayesian Compressive Sensing
Xiaozhen Ren, Lihong Qiao, and Lianjie Tian
College of Information Science and Engineering,
Henan University of Technology
Zhengzhou, China
Abstract—As the received data obtained by 4-D SAR is sparse
and non-uniform, a new 4-D SAR imaging method based on
Bayesian compressive sensing is proposed in this paper. After the
analysis of the signal characteristics of 4-D SAR system, the 4-D
imaging process can be divided into two steps. The azimuth-slant
range image is acquired by traditional pulse compression first,
and then the height-velocity image is reconstructed based on
Bayesian compressive sensing. Simulation results confirm the
effectiveness of the proposed method.
Index Terms—synthetic aperture radar, four-dimensional,
sparse imaging, Bayesian compressive sensing.
I. INTRODUCTION
Traditional synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems can
reconstruct two-dimensional (2-D) images of the interested
area with all-weather capability, and SAR tomography extends
the resolution capability of 2-D SAR into the height direction
for 3-D imaging. 4-D SAR imaging, also referred to as
differential SAR tomography, is a natural extension of SAR
tomography [1-3]. It can distinguish the heights and velocities
of different scatterers within the same azimuth-range resolution
cell. Therefore, 4-D imaging technique has resolving
capabilities in the azimuth-range-height-velocity 4-D space.
Unfortunately, for the current 4-D SAR system, the received
data is sparse and non-uniform in the baseline-time plane.
Hence, the imaging results obtained by traditional methods are
limited by high sidelobes.
To overcome the imaging difficulties caused by the spare
aperture data, singular value decomposition (SVD) and
inverse problem based methods were all proposed to achieve
sidelobe reduction [4, 5]. An additional problem is that these
methods should handle an ill-conditioning inverse problem.
Subsequently, also compressive sensing (CS) based method
was considered to focus the height-velocity image [3]. CS is a
model-based framework for data acquisition and signal
recovery based on the premise that a signal having a sparse
representation in one basis can be reconstructed from a small
number of measurements collected in a second basis that is
incoherent with the first [6, 7]. However, the image quality is
unsatisfactory under low SNR level.
In recent years, there has been increased concern over
Bayesian compressive sensing (BCS) [8, 9]. BCS methods can
provide certain improvements when compared with CS
methods in low noise level. Therefore, from the BCS
perspective, we propose a novel algorithm for 4-D SAR
imaging in this paper.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2
presents the basis theory of BCS. In Section 3, a new 4-D SAR
imaging scheme based on BCS is described in detail. The
performance of the method is investigated by simulated data in
Section 4. Finally, Section 5 gives a brief conclusion.
II. B
AYESIAN COMPRESSIVE SENSING
Consider a discrete signal
x with a length of L, which has
sparse representation in an orthogonal basis
Ψ
, and then the
signal
x can be represented as
x=
Ψσ
(1)
where
σ
denotes the projection coefficient vector. If
σ
has
only J nonzero or significant entries, the signal
x can be
considered as J-sparse in orthogonal basis
Ψ
.
From the CS framework, the signal
x can be reconstructed
from K (
(log( ))
OJ LJ=⋅ ) measurements
only if the
measurements were obtained in a sensing basis
Φ
, which is
mutually incoherent to the basis
Ψ
, where the mutual
coherency is defined as [6, 7]:
1,
max ,
kj
kj L
M
μφψ
≤≤
(, )=
ΦΨ
(2)
Therefore, the measurement vector can be written as
+y= x= n
ΦΦΨσ
(3)
Equation (3) could be cast as the classical problem of signal
recovery and denoising in estimation theory. Based on the
theory of Bayesian compressive sensing, the maximum a
posteriori (MAP) estimator can be used to estimate
σ
, which
is expressed as
()
()
()
2
ˆ
arg max arg max | ,
n
ppp
δ
σσ
⎡⎤
⎡⎤
== ⋅
⎣⎦
⎣⎦
yy
σσ σσ
(4)
As for high frequency radars, the targets can be modeled as
sparse based on the hypothesis of multi-center of scattering,
then the back scattering field of the target have stronger
sparsity; that is to say, most energy is contributed by seldom
scattering centers [10]. Therefore, the 4-D SAR imaging can be
transformed into the problem of sparse signal representation,
and BCS-based method can be used for image reconstruction.