APPLICATIONS OF COMPRESSED SENSING FOR MULTIPLE TRANSMITTERS MULTIPLE AZIMUTH BEAMS SAR IMAGING

High speed analog-to-digital (A/D) sampling and a large amount of echo storage are two basic challenges of high resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging. In this paper, a novel SAR imaging algorithm which named CS-MTMAB is proposed based on compressed sensing (CS) and multiple transmitters multiple azimuth beams (MTMAB). In particular, this new algorithm, which respectively reconstructs the targets in range and azimuth directions via CS technique, simultaneously provides a high resolution and wideswath two-dimensional map of the spatial distribution of targets with a significant reduction in the number of data samples beyond the Nyquist theorem and with an implication in simplification of radar architecture. The simulation results and analysis show that this new imaging scheme allows the aperture to be compressed and presents many important applications and advantages among which include reduced on-board storage constraints, higher resolution, lower peak side-lobe ratio (PSLR) and integrated side-lobe ratio (ISLR), less sampled data than the traditional SAR imaging algorithm, and also indicate that it has high robustness and strong immunity in the presence of serious noise. Finally, the real raw airborne SAR data experiment is performed to validate the proposed processing procedure.