A novel Scan SAR imaging method for maritime surveillance via Lp regularization

作者:Ni, Jia-cheng; Zhang, Qun*; Yin, Yu-fu; Luo, Ying; Sun, Li
来源:International Journal of Remote Sensing, 2018, 39(1): 169-190.
DOI:10.1080/01431161.2017.1382744

摘要

In this article, a novel Scan mode synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging method for maritime surveillance is presented. Conventional Scan SAR is generally operated with severe azimuth resolution loss in order to cover a large area. The proposed imaging method changes the way Scan SAR illuminates subscenes and presents a new radar illuminating strategy based on ships' spatial distribution in each sub-scene. To gain ships' spatial distribution, a scene sensing algorithm based on radar range profiles together with a peak-seeking and clustering algorithm is introduced. After that, a Markov transfer-probability matrix is generated to make sure that radar illuminates each sub-scene randomly under the probability we calculated before. Finally, an imaging algorithm within the L-p (0 < p <= 1) regularization framework is utilized to reconstruct each sub-scene; the regularization problem is solved by an improved iterative thresholding algorithm. The whole wide swath image is joined by putting all the sub-scenes together. Experimental results support that the proposed imaging method can perform high-resolution wide swath SAR imaging effectively and efficiently without reducing the image resolution.