SAR Imaging of Moving Targets via Compressive Sensing

An algorithm based on compressive sensing (CS) is proposed for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging of moving targets. The received SAR echo is decomposed into the sum of basis sub-signals, which are generated by discretizing the target spatial domain and velocity domain and synthesizing the SAR received data for every discretized spatial position and velocity candidate. In this way, the SAR imaging problem is converted into sub-signal selection problem. In the case that moving targets are sparsely distributed in the observed scene, their reflectivities, positions and velocities can be obtained by using the CS technique. It is shown that, compared with traditional algorithms, the target image obtained by the proposed algorithm has higher resolution and lower side-lobe while the required number of measurements can be an order of magnitude less than that by sampling at Nyquist sampling rate. Moreover, multiple targets with different speeds can be imaged simultaneously, so the proposed algorithm has higher efficiency.