Quantitative and qualitative comparison of SAR images from incomplete measurements using compressed sensing and nonuniform FFT

In this paper the performance of two wideband synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging methods from incomplete data sets are compared quantitatively and qualitatively. The first approach uses nonuniform fast Fourier transform (NUFFT) SAR to form images from nonuniform spatial and frequency data points. The second approach benefits from the emerging compressed sensing (CS) methodology to recover raw data from undersampled measurements. The results of our experimental tests show that CS has a better performance in terms of error and image contrast while NUFFT SAR has lower computational complexity.