This paper presents a survey of recent research on sparsity-driven synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging.In particular, it reviews (i) analysis and synthesis-based sparse signal representation formulations for SAR image formation together with the associated imaging results; (ii) sparsity-based methods for wide-angle SAR imaging and anisotropy characterization; (iii) sparsity-based methods for joint imaging and autofocusing from data with phase errors; (iv) techniques for exploiting sparsity for SAR imaging of scenes containing moving objects, and (v) recent work on compressed sensing-based analysis and design of SAR sensing missions.
Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) returns from a scene with motion can be viewed as data from a stationary scene, but with phase errors due to motion. Based on this perspective, we formulate the problem of SAR imaging of motion-containing scenes as one of joint imaging and phase error compensation. The proposed method is based on the minimization of a cost function which involves sparsity-imposing regularization terms on the reflectivity field to be imaged, considering that it admits a sparse representation as well as on the spatial structure of the motion-related phase errors, reflecting the assumption that only a small percentage of the entire scene contains moving objects. To incorporate the spatial structure of the phase errors into the problem, we provide three different sparsity-enforcing prior terms. In order to achieve computational gains, we also present a two-step version of our approach, which first determines regions of interest that are likely to contain the moving objects and then applies our sparsity-driven approach for joint image reconstruction and autofocusing in such a spatially constrained setting. Our preliminary experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of this new moving target SAR imaging approach.
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