A New Algorithm for Sparse Aperture Interpolation

A new algorithm for filling sparse aperture synthetic aperture radar (SAR)/inverse SAR (ISAR) data, which applies for widely gapped apertures, is proposed in this letter. An Estimating Signal Parameter via Rotational Invariance Techniques(ESPRIT)-based parametric approach is first used to estimate the power distribution with the sparse data. With the estimated power spectrum as prior information, by minimizing a weighted norm as a constraint, the full aperture data can be estimated. Although the algorithm is proposed for the sparse aperture interpolation in SAR/ISAR, it can be applied to other gapped data spectral estimation problems as well. Both numerical and experimental examples are provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm.