Huizhang Yang

dblp:145/1827 · DBLP profile ↗
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26ranked-venue papers
15as first author
23since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0001-9725-088XORCID · corroborated

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 22 · 14 first-author · 20 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 4 · 1 first-author · 3 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 Principal Component Maximization: A Novel Method for SAR Image Recovery From Raw Data Without System Parameters
abstract
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imaging relies on using focusing algorithms to transform raw measurement data into radar images. These algorithms require knowledge of SAR system parameters, such as wavelength, center slant range, fast time sampling rate, pulse repetition interval, waveform, and platform speed. However, in non-cooperative scenarios or when metadata is corrupted, these parameters are unavailable, rendering traditional algorithms ineffective. To address this challenge, this article presents a novel parameter-free method for recovering SAR images from raw data without the requirement of any SAR system parameters. Firstly, we introduce an approximated matched filtering model that leverages the shift-invariance properties of SAR echoes, enabling image formation via convolving the raw data with an unknown reference echo. Secondly, we develop a Principal Component Maximization (PCM) method that exploits the low-dimensional structure of SAR signals to estimate the reference echo. The PCM method employs a three-stage procedure: 1) segment raw data into blocks; 2) normalize the energy of each block; and 3) maximize the principal component's energy across all blocks, enabling robust estimation of the reference echo under non-stationary clutter. Experimental results on various SAR datasets demonstrate that our method can effectively recover SAR images from raw data without any system parameters. To facilitate reproducibility, the Matlab program is available at https://github.com/huizhangyang/pcm.
Huizhang Yang, Shao-Shan Zuo, Zhong Liu 0001, Jian Yang 0011
IEEE Trans. Image Process.1
2025 RFI Removal From SAR Imagery via Sparse Parametric Estimation of LFM Interferences
abstract
One of the challenges in spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is modeling and mitigating radio frequency interference (RFI) artifacts in SAR imagery. Linear frequency modulated (LFM) signals have been commonly used for characterizing the radar interferences in SAR. In this letter, we propose a new signal model that approximates RFI as a mixture of multiple LFM components in the focused SAR image domain. The azimuth and range frequency modulation (FM) rates for each LFM component are estimated effectively using a sparse parametric representation of LFM interferences with a discretized LFM dictionary. This approach is then tested within the recently developed RFI suppression framework using a 2-D SPECtral ANalysis (2-D SPECAN) algorithm through LFM focusing and notch filtering in the spectral domain [1]. Experimental studies on Sentinel-1 single-look complex images demonstrate that the proposed LFM model and sparse parametric estimation scheme outperforms existing RFI removal methods.
Dehui Yang, Feng Xi, Qihao Cao, Huizhang Yang
IEEE Geosci. Remote. Sens. Lett.4
2025 Least-Square Estimation of FM Rates for Removing LFM Interference in SAR Images
abstract
Ground and spaceborne radars can cause severe linear-frequency modulation (LFM) interference in spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. To address this problem, it is important to develop an efficient algorithm for LFM interference suppression in SAR images. For this purpose, in this paper we first propose a fast estimator for retrieving the frequency-modulation (FM) rates of the LFM interference based on least-square estimation. Then, we develop a spectral focusing-based algorithm for removing LFM interference using the estimated FM rates. Real-data and simulation experiments show that the proposed algorithm can accurately estimate the FM rates and effectively remove LFM interference signatures in interferometric wide-swath single-look-complex images.
Peijun Jin, Huizhang Yang, Xuanchen Guo, Shuolin Pan
IEEE Signal Process. Lett.2
2025 A Data-Driven Motion Compensation Scheme for Compressed Sensing SAR Image Restoration
abstract
Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) can produce well-focused images based on accurate observation models. However, motion errors in the data acquisition process often introduce inaccuracies in the models and degrade the image quality. Classical motion compensation (MOCO) methods can mitigate this problem, but they are not applicable to compressed sensing (CS) SAR imaging. Existing CS SAR imaging methods can jointly estimate and compensate the motion error from the data by iterative optimization, but they incur a high computational cost. To solve these problems, in this article, we propose an efficient data-driven MOCO strategy for CS SAR imaging. Specifically, we develop a two-step measurement estimation scheme followed by a fitting and filtering procedure to extract the motion error from the data. Then, we use the estimated motion error to correct the CS SAR observation model and reformulate a sparse SAR reconstruction problem based on the corrected model. This strategy significantly reduces the computational cost compared with existing CS SAR MOCO methods. To further expedite the image recovery, we design a fast imaging algorithm that exploits the feature of the observation matrix to accelerate the matrix-vector products and the interpolation operations involved in the recovery problem. Experimental results show that the proposed method can efficiently reconstruct SAR images from CS SAR data with motion errors and offer favorable imaging performance.
Chengzhi Chen, Huizhang Yang, Shengyao Chen, Feng Xi, Zhong Liu 0001
IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens.2
2025 Lambda-1 Detector: Adaptive Interference Detection in Synthetic Aperture Radar Images
abstract
This article proposes a novel eigenvalue-based detector, called Lambda-1 detector, for adaptive and robust interference detection in single-look-complex (SLC) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. The proposed method leverages the increased eigenvalues caused by interference in SAR image blocks, where the interference is expected to have a small set of eigenvalues, particularly with a dominating one. Specifically, the method segments the image into multiple blocks, computes the eigenvalues of each block’s covariance matrix, and compares the largest eigenvalue$\lambda _{1}$with a threshold to determine the presence of interference under the criteria of constant false alarm rate (CFAR), thereby enabling adaptive interference detection against varying levels of interference-to-signal ratios (ISRs). The largest eigenvalue is characterized by the order-2 Tracy-Widom distribution (no closed-form expression) under the assumption of the image’s homogeneity, and the threshold is adaptively determined based on a scaled and shifted Gamma distribution that fits this distribution with a closed-form expression. The method is robust by first modeling and then correcting the impacts of upsampling and windowing of SAR image data on the fit distribution’s parameters, and by incorporating outlier removal preprocessing. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method in successfully detecting both strong and weak interferences in various SAR images, including Sentinel-1 and Gaofen-3. The detection performance is quantitatively evaluated using false alarm rate$P_{\mathrm { fa}}$and detection rate$P_{d}$. In summary, the proposed Lambda-1 detector effectively identifies interference artifacts in focused SAR images and holds promise for improving the quality of SAR imagery by incorporating adaptive interference removal.
Huizhang Yang, Ping Lang, Yaomin He, Xingyu Lu 0003, Zhong Liu 0001, Jian Yang 0011
IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens.1
2025 Localization of Ground-Based Periodic Pulse Interferers Using Time Difference of Arrival Estimation in SAR Satellite Systems
Shengqi Zhou, Xingyu Lu 0003, Jianchao Yang, Huizhang Yang, Junpeng Du, Lunhao Duan, Wenchao Yu, Ke Tan 0007, Shaojia Ge, Hong Gu 0002
IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens.4
2024 A Motion Compensation Scheme for Compressed Sensing SAR Image Restoration Using Measured Antenna Phase Center Data
abstract
Compressed sensing (CS) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) can recover images from undersampled SAR data based on accurate observation models. However, motion errors often cause inaccuracies in observation data and result in defocusing of the reconstructed SAR images. Existing methods can restore and compensate the motion error from data by iterative optimization, which, however, leads to significantly increased computational cost. In this article, we propose an efficient motion compensation (MOCO) scheme for CS SAR using measured antenna phase center (APC) data. Specifically, we exploit the motion error measured by the navigation device to correct the CS SAR observation model. Then, we use the corrected model to formulate a new sparse SAR reconstruction problem. This leads to substantially lower computational cost than the existing MOCO methods in CS SAR. To further achieve fast image recovery, we design a fast imaging algorithm for CS SAR with MOCO to speed up some matrix–vector products involved in the reconstruction problem. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can efficiently reconstruct SAR images from CS SAR data with motion errors.
Chengzhi Chen, Huizhang Yang, Shengyao Chen, Feng Xi, Zhong Liu 0001
IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens.2
2024 Robust Block Subspace Filtering for Efficient Removal of Radio Interference in Synthetic Aperture Radar Images
abstract
Due to spectrum sharing spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) often experiences signal interference emitted by ground radio systems. Interference removal methods for SAR images are important measures to address this problem. Among these methods, block subspace filtering (BSF) has the advantage of removing various types of interference signals directly in single look complex (SLC) images. However, it assumes that the observation scene does not contain strong point scatterers, otherwise, BSF will have severe performance decline in terms of losing strong point scatterer intensity and causing horizontal or vertical black lines. This paper proposes a Robust version of BSF (RBSF), which can successfully overcome the above performance decline, thereby significantly improving the robustness of the algorithm. Specifically, RBSF uses a constant false alarm rate detector to detect and mask out strong scattering pixels from the SLC image. Then, BSF reconstructs the interference components from the SLC image with strong pixels being masked out, and finally subtracts them from the original SLC image. Moreover, we find that interference will reduce, to some extent, the image contrast and entropy. Based on this finding, we design an adaptive RBSF method which selects the subspace dimension parameter adaptively by means of optimizing the image contrast and entropy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the RBSF algorithm achieves significant performance improvement over the original BSF algorithm.
Huizhang Yang, Ping Lang, Xingyu Lu 0003, Shengyao Chen, Feng Xi, Zhong Liu 0001, Jian Yang 0011
IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens.1
2024 Design of Passive Modes and Parameter Estimation Methods for Localizing Terrestrial Emitters via SAR Systems
abstract
Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems employ active imaging modes to collect observation data. However, restrictions such as power constraints often necessitate SAR systems to operate with a limited operational duty cycle, resulting in considerable idle time per orbit. This article introduces two innovative observation modes for SAR systems, aiming to effectively utilize this idle time for localizing terrestrial emitters, such as radar and communication systems, in the azimuth-range plane of SAR observation geometry. The proposed modes leverage passive observation capability of SAR systems and work in low power during time slots not dedicated to active imaging. The implementation first involves establishing observation geometries and positioning planes for SAR systems moving along linear and circular trajectories. Next, two passive observation modes are designed, utilizing two azimuth receive beams to gather observations from distinct angles along linear and circular trajectories, respectively. Subsequently, parametric models of beam center crossing times (BCCTs) are then developed, with the emitter coordinate as model parameters. Analytical and numerical positioning methods are proposed by inversing the model parameters. Additionally, Cramer–Rao lower bounds (CRBLs) are derived for the emitter coordinate under the proposed observation modes, and it is demonstrated that the proposed estimators achieve these theoretical bounds. Finally, several simulation experiments are conducted to analyze the performance of the proposed modes and methods.
Huizhang Yang, Zhong Liu 0001, Jian Yang 0011
IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens.1
2024 Analysis on the Accuracy Bounds for Shift Estimation From Interferometric SAR Images
abstract
Estimating the shift of image patches between two interferometric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is a classic problem in SAR signal processing and serves as the foundation of many remote sensing applications. In 2000, Bamler established the theoretical accuracy bound for such estimation under the assumption that image patches are stationary, circular, and white Gaussian signals. However, these assumptions may not fully hold in practical scenarios. For instance, in azimuth shift estimation the azimuth spectrum is inherently nonflat due to antenna pattern weighting, and thus the assumption of white Gaussian will not be satisfied even for homogeneous areas consisting of Gaussian scatterers. Consequently, the theoretical bound will be accordingly inaccurate (systematically biased, as will be proved in this article). To bridge this theoretical gap, we propose two probability density models for characterizing a pair of interferometric images with relaxed statistical assumptions, where the signals can be either colored-Gaussian or non-Gaussian. Utilizing these models, we derive an exact expression for the asymptotical shift estimation accuracy for the cross-correlation estimator (CCE). The result is then extended from azimuth single-channel to multichannel SAR systems. Based on our models, we also establish the Cramér-Rao lower bounds (CRLBs) of the shift estimation in the scenarios of colored-Gaussian and non-Gaussian signals and show that these bounds are, in general, not identical to the asymptotical accuracy of CCE (they are identical only when the image signals are white Gaussian). Our theoretical findings generalize the existing accuracy bound to the scenarios of colored-Gaussian as well as non-Gaussian image signals, offering tighter theoretical bounds for assessing the accuracy of shift estimation from interferometric SAR (InSAR) images.
Huizhang Yang
IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens.1
2023 A Novel Radar Signals Sorting Method via Residual Graph Convolutional Network
abstract
The dense, complex and variable electromagnetic environment poses a serious challenge to radar signal sorting (RSS) in modern electronic reconnaissance systems. In order to improve RSS performance, this letter proposes a semi-supervised learning framework-based RSS method via a residual graph convolutional network (ResGCN-RSS) to effectively improve the generalization ability of the signal sorting models in small data scenarios. Firstly, the graph structure construction of intercepted radar signals is performed via K-nearest neighbor algorithm. Then, the three-layer ResGCN is designed to adaptively improve the features learning. Finally, RSS can be effectively and efficiently implemented through an end-to-end ResGCN with small labeled graph data of interleaved radar signals. The simulation experimental results show that our proposed method can achieve better average accuracy with little computational cost increasing when the labeled data is very small, compared to some existing methods.
Ping Lang, Xiongjun Fu, Jian Dong 0008, Huizhang Yang, Jian Yang 0011
IEEE Signal Process. Lett.4
2023 Localizing Ground-Based Pulse Emitters via Synthetic Aperture Radar: Model and Method
abstract
Signals from ground-based emitters frequently cause interference to synthetic aperture radar (SAR). A typical class of such interference signals is the transmitted pulses of ground-based radar systems due to the spectrum sharing between the Earth exploration-satellite service (active) and radiolocation in International Telecommunication Union radio regulations. In this paper, we study the localization model and method of ground-based pulse emitters using SAR as the observation platform. Specifically, we first establish a nonlinear parametric observation model of pulse time of arrival (PTOA) based on SAR observation geometry, where the model parameters include the emitter position in SAR range-azimuth plane. Then, we approximate the PTOA observation model by a second-order polynomial, and estimate the azimuth and range positions of the emitter from the polynomial coefficients. Finally, we perform numerical experiments to test the accuracy of the proposed PTOA localization method. The results show that our method can achieve meter-level azimuth accuracy and kilometer-level range accuracy. Moreover, we study the Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB) of the emitter location, and by comparison, we show that the root mean square error of the proposed method is only about 1.5 times coarser than that of CRLB, demonstrating that our method achieves near-optimal localization accuracy.
Huizhang Yang, Jian Yang 0011, Zhong Liu 0001
IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens.1
2022 Ship Detection of Polarimetric SAR Images Using a Nonlocal Spatial Information-Guided Method
abstract
Ship detection of polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) plays an important role in marine monitoring and ocean protection. Over the past years, local spatial information around pixels has been successfully applied to this task. However, few works have been done on PolSAR ship detection using the nonlocal spatial information (NSI). Within this context, we here propose one NSI-guided ship detection method PMR. Briefly speaking, the feature power difference (PD) is first constructed by computing the total power difference between the center pixelcand its most similar nonlocal pixeliwithin a 7×7 window. Then, the polarimetric feature reflection symmetry (RS) is introduced into PD to construct the method PMR (i.e., PD Multiply RS) for further enhancing the target-to-clutter ratio (TCR) and improving the ship detection accuracy. Experiments carried out on three real PolSAR datasets show that, in comparison with some other methods, especially the recently proposed local neighborhood information-based ship detector PWFN, PMR is more apt for ship detection. On average, its figure of merit (FoM) and TCR values respectively surpass PWFN0.24 and 12.83 dB.
Tao Zhang 0027, Zenghui Zhang, Huizhang Yang, Weiwei Guo, Zhen Yang 0012
IEEE Geosci. Remote. Sens. Lett.3
2022 Automatic RFI Identification for Sentinel-1 Based on Siamese-Type Deep CNN Using Repeat-Pass Images
abstract
Since the start of the Sentinel-1 mission, numerous cases of severe image degradation caused by RFI have been reported, which puts forward an urgent need for RFI identification and mitigation. In this paper, an automatic RFI identification method is proposed based on a siamese-type deep convolutional neural network (Siam-CNN-RIM). The Siam-CNN-RIM can be served as a pre-processing step before RFI mitigation to identify whether an S-1 image is RFI-contaminated or not. Different from traditional RFI identification networks which only use a single image as input, an additional image in the repeat-pass time-series is also fed into the input of Siam-CNN-RIM as a reference. Both of the input images correspond to the same illuminated area, and pass through the same convolutional layer followed by an energy function, such that the different features caused by RFI can be extracted and the background terrain features can be ignored. This is beneficial for distinguishing the real RFI signatures and the similar terrain signatures that may cause false positives, and thus improving the RFI identification performance. Experimental results show that the proposed method is robust in different scenarios and can achieve more than 97% RFI identification accuracy, even for the open-set task where the test scenarios are not included in the training set.
Xingyu Lu 0003, Huizhang Yang, Ke Tan 0007, Xianglin Bao, Hong Gu 0002
IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens.4
2022 GPU-Oriented Designs of Constant False Alarm Rate Detectors for Fast Target Detection in Radar Images
abstract
Constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detector is a class of widely used methods for target detection in radar images. Classical CFAR detectors perform target detection on a pixel-by-pixel basis using certain sliding windows for estimating clutter statistics, which run fast for small images. However, as the image size gets large, the time cost of these detectors will increase significantly since the time complexity with respect toN×N-pixel image isO(N2). In practice, radar images, such as those in synthetic aperture radar (SAR), usually have very large numbers of pixels (which can be on the order of 10000 × 10000), making the classical CFAR detectors very time-consuming when applied to these images. In this paper, we present graphics processing unit (GPU)-oriented Designs for speeding up CFAR detectors, including smallest/greatest-of CFAR and order-statistic CFAR. The proposed designs implement CFAR detectors via tensor operations, including tensor convolution, shift, and boolean operation, which can be fast operated by GPU. Experiment results show that the proposed GPU-oriented CFAR detectors running on a high-performance Nvidia RTX 3090 GPU can be thousands of times faster than the classical CFAR detectors, and realize real-time target detection in large-size radar images. Examples using SAR and range-Doppler images are provided as illustrative applications of the proposed GPU CFAR detectors to target detection in radar images.
Huizhang Yang, Tao Zhang 0027, Yaomin He, Yihua Dan, Junjun Yin 0001, Benteng Ma, Jian Yang 0011
IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens.1
2022 Two-Dimensional Spectral Analysis Filter for Removal of LFM Radar Interference in Spaceborne SAR Imagery
abstract
Radio spectrum bands allocated to spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery are shared by multiple missions. In practical radio spectrum environments, these bands are also used by some ground radars, e.g., C-band weather radar. Due to this fact, radio frequency interference (RFI) may occur for a spaceborne SAR when its received signals contain the transmitted waveforms from another SAR or radar operating at the same frequency band. This particular class of RFI is usually linear-frequency-modulation (LFM) signals, which can cause bright radiometric artifacts in focused SAR images. Most existing signal processing approaches designed for addressing this problem belong to the class of preprocessing methods, which removes RFI in level-0 raw radar data before SAR focusing. In this article, we propose a postprocessing kernel—2-D SPECtral ANalysis (2-D SPECAN) filter, for removing the class of LFM RFI in level-1 SLC images. The filtering consists of three main steps: Step 1: focus LFM RFI artifacts in SLC images as point-like responses in the spectral domain via 2-D SPECAN; Step 2: perform 2-D notch filtering in the spectral domain to remove the most contribution of the RFI responses; and Step 3: transform the filtered spectrum back into the SLC image domain using the inverse operation of the 2-D SPECAN. For computation efficiency, we design a simplified processing flow and adopt a blockwise processing strategy. Experiments with several Sentinel-1 SLC images demonstrate that severe RFI artifacts in SLC images can be removed significantly by the proposed method.
Huizhang Yang, Yaomin He, Yanlei Du, Tao Zhang 0027, Junjun Yin 0001, Jian Yang 0011
IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens.1
2022 BSF: Block Subspace Filter for Removing Narrowband and Wideband Radio Interference Artifacts in Single-Look Complex SAR Images
abstract
Radio signals emitted by various sources, such as ground radars and broadcast/communication devices, can unintentionally cause radio frequency interference (RFI) to spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR), degrading SAR image qualities to various degrees. Most existing methods tackle this problem by applying specially designed preprocessing steps to RFI-polluted level-0 SAR data before SAR focusing. However, such preprocessing is not widely used in spaceborne SAR, as there exist radiometric artifacts due to various RFI sources in the level-1 single-look complex (SLC) image products in many spaceborne SAR data, e.g., Sentinel-1 open data archives. To address this problem, in this article, we first propose a generic subspace model for characterizing a variety of RFI types, which reveals a low-dimensional structure of RFI subspace. Based on the proposed model, we next design a block subspace filter (BSF) for removing RFI artifacts in SLC SAR images directly. Experiments with ERS-2, ENVISAT/ASAR, Sentinel-1, and Gaofen-3 data are presented, and quantitative assessments based on numerical simulations are provided, which demonstrates the promising performance and application potentials of the proposed method. BSF is simple yet efficient and does not require performing preprocessing on level-0 raw data, which is helpful for users to obtain clean SAR images. MATLAB/Octave code implementation of BSF is available athttps://github.com/huizhangyang/BSF.
Huizhang Yang, Kun Li 0002, Jie Li 0027, Yanlei Du, Jian Yang 0011
IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens.1
2022 Corrections to "Region-Based Polarimetric Covariance Difference Matrix for PolSAR Ship Detection"
abstract
In the above article[1], the average TCR values inTable IIwere incorrectly presented. The corrected table is given here:
Tao Zhang 0027, Wei Wang 0099, Sinong Quan, Huizhang Yang, Huilin Xiong, Zenghui Zhang, Wenxian Yu
IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens.4
2022 Region-Based Polarimetric Covariance Difference Matrix for PolSAR Ship Detection
abstract
To more effectively detect small ships, in this article, a novel region-based polarimetric covariance difference matrix [RP] is put forward, which mainly consists of two stages. Briefly speaking, in the first stage, a new pixel representation way is proposed to depict the spatial characteristics of pixel, through which the difference information related to pixel’s local region is calculated as well. In the second stage, the global region difference information of pixel is computed. Finally, we construct [RP] via fusing these two different kinds of information together with a balance factor$c$. Meanwhile, considering that the backscattering energy of ships is useful for ship detection, a new intensity-driven polarimetric notch filter (ID-PNFRP) is also derived from [RP]. Three different datasets are adopted to evaluate the effectiveness of [RP] and ID-PNFRP. Experimental results show that: 1) compared with the polarimetric covariance matrix [$C$] and the polarimetric covariance difference matrix [$P$], [RP] is more suitable for ship detection and 2) compared with the original geometrical perturbation-polarimetric notch filter (GP-PNF) and the total power detector SPAN, the proposed method ID-PNFRPcan better detect small ships with greater figure of merit (FoM) and target-to-clutter ratio (TCR) values.
Tao Zhang 0027, Wei Wang 0099, Sinong Quan, Huizhang Yang, Huilin Xiong, Zenghui Zhang, Wenxian Yu
IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens.4
2021 A Dictionary-Based SAR RFI Suppression Method via Robust PCA and Chirp Scaling Algorithm
abstract
Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is an important imaging tool in many applications. Its imaging quality can be easily degraded by radio-frequency interferences (RFIs), among which the narrowband ones are typical. In recent years, it is shown that the narrowband RFI has a low-rank property and this property can be combined with the sparsity of radar echoes' to develop efficient RFI-suppression algorithms. However, these works usually consider the case of sparse echoes in the impulse-based radar, which is not suitable for typical SAR systems that use a chirp signal with a relatively long pulse duration. Some works adopt a large 2-D dictionary to introduce sparse representation for the echoes, which nevertheless lack efficient numerical algorithms, because the large dictionary brings high storage cost and computational burden. Motivated by these problems, this letter introduces an operator modeling approach for the echo dictionary and proposes a dictionary-based SAR RFI-suppression method under the framework of robust principle component analysis (RPCA). In the proposed method, the useful echo is sparsely represented by a dictionary, and the dictionary's analysis and synthesis operators are modeled as two sequences of low-cost operations by exploiting the chirp scaling algorithm. Then, an efficient algorithm is derived for solving the dictionary-based RPCA problem. Numerical simulations show that the proposed method is robust and efficient for SAR narrowband RFI suppression.
Huizhang Yang, Chengzhi Chen, Shengyao Chen, Feng Xi, Zhong Liu 0001
IEEE Geosci. Remote. Sens. Lett.1
2021 SAR RFI Suppression for Extended Scene Using Interferometric Data via Joint Low-Rank and Sparse Optimization
abstract
Radio frequency interference (RFI) can significantly pollute synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data and images, which is also harmful to SAR interferometry (InSAR) for retrieving elevational information. To address this issue, in recent years, a class of advanced RFI suppression methods has been proposed based on narrowband properties of RFI and sparsity assumptions of radar echoes or target reflectivity. However, for SAR echoes and the associated scene reflectivity, these assumptions are usually not feasible when the imaged scene is spatially extended. In view of these problems, this study proposes an InSAR-based RFI suppression method for the case of extended scenes. For this task, we combine the RFI-polluted SAR data with RFI-free interferometric data to form an interferometric SAR data pair. We show that such an InSAR data pair embeds an interferogram having the image amplitude multiplying by a complex exponential interferometric phase. We treat the interferogram as a kind of natural image and use discrete Fourier cosine transform (DCT) for its sparse representation. Then combining the DCT-domain sparsity with low-rank modeling of RFI, we retrieve the interferogram and reconstruct the SAR image via joint low-rank and sparse optimization. Numerical simulations show that the proposed method can effectively recover SAR images and interferometric phases from RFI-polluted SAR data.
Huizhang Yang, Chengzhi Chen, Shengyao Chen, Feng Xi, Zhong Liu 0001
IEEE Geosci. Remote. Sens. Lett.1
2021 Interferometric Phase Retrieval for Multimode InSAR via Sparse Recovery
abstract
Modern spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) features a capacity of multiple imaging modes. It comes with Earth-observation data archives consisting of SAR images acquired in various modes with different resolutions and coverage. In this context, in addition to using single-mode images for SAR interferometry (InSAR), exploiting images acquired in different imaging modes for InSAR can provide extra interferograms and, thus, favors the retrieval of interferometric information. The interferometric processing of multimode image pairs requires special considerations due to significant variations in the Doppler spectra. Conventionally, the InSAR technique only uses the spectral band common in both master and slave images, and the remaining band is discarded before interferogram formation. Therefore, conventional processing cannot make full use of the observed data, and the interferogram quality is limited by the common band spectra. In this article, by exploiting the conventionally discarded spectrum, we present a new interferometric phase retrieval method for multimode InSAR data to improve interferogram quality. To this end, first, we propose a linear model to characterize the interferometric phase of a multimode image pair based on image spectral relation. Second, we adopt a sparse recovery method to inverse the linear model for the retrieval of the interferometric phase. Finally, we present real-data experiments on TerraSAR-X staring spotlight to sliding spotlight interferometry and Sentinel-1 strip map to Terrain Observation by Progressive Scan (TOPS) interferometry to test the proposed method. The experiment results show that the proposed method can provide interferograms with reduced phase noise and defocusing effect for multimode InSAR.
Huizhang Yang, Chengzhi Chen, Shengyao Chen, Feng Xi, Zhong Liu 0001
IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens.1
2021 On the Mutual Interference Between Spaceborne SARs: Modeling, Characterization, and Mitigation
abstract
As the radio spectrum available to spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is restricted to certain limited frequency intervals, there are many different spaceborne SAR systems sharing common frequency bands. Due to this reason, it is reported that two spaceborne SARs at orbit cross positions can potentially cause severe mutual interference. Specifically, the transmitting signal of an SAR, typically linear frequency modulated (LFM), can be directly received by the side or back lobes of another SAR’s antenna, causing radiometric artifacts in the focused image. This article tries to model and characterize the artifacts and study efficient methods for mitigating them. To this end, we formulate an analytical model for describing the artifact, which reveals that the mutual interference can introduce a 2-D LFM radiometric artifact in image domain with a limited spatial extent. We show that the artifact is low-rank based on a range–azimuth decoupling analysis and 2-D high-order Taylor expansion. Based on the low-rank model, we show that two methods, i.e., principal component analysis and its robust variant, can be adopted to efficiently mitigate the artifact via processing in the image domain. The former method has the advantage of fast processing speed, for example, a subswath of Sentinel-1 interferometric wide swath image can be processed within 70 s via blockwise processing, whereas the latter provides improved accuracy for sparse pointlike scatterers. Experiment results demonstrate that the radiometric artifacts caused by mutual interference in Sentinel-1 level-1 images can be efficiently mitigated via the proposed methods.
Huizhang Yang, Mingliang Tao, Shengyao Chen, Feng Xi, Zhong Liu 0001
IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens.1
2020 Sub-Nyquist sampling with independent measurements
Shengyao Chen, Zhiyong Cheng 0003, Huizhang Yang, Feng Xi, Zhong Liu 0001
Signal Process.3
2020 Non-Common Band SAR Interferometry Via Compressive Sensing
abstract
To avoid decorrelation, conventional synthetic aperture radar interferometry (InSAR) requires that interferometric images should have a common spectral band and the same resolution after proper preprocessing. For a high-resolution (HR) image and a low-resolution (LR) one, the interferogram quality is limited by the LR one since the non-common band (NCB) between two images is usually discarded. In this article, we try to establish an InSAR method to improve interferogram quality by means of exploiting the NCB. To this end, we first define a new interferogram, which has the same resolution as the HR image. Then we formulate the interferometric relationship between the two images into a compressive sensing (CS) model, which contains the proposed HR interferogram. With the sparsity of interferogram in appropriate domains, we model the interferogram formation as a typical sparse recovery problem. Due to the speckle effect in coherent radar imaging, the sensing matrix of our CS model is inherently random. We theoretically prove that the sensing matrix satisfies restricted isometry property, and thus the interferogram recovery performance is guaranteed. Furthermore, we provide a fast interferogram formation algorithm by exploiting computationally efficient structures of the sensing matrix. Numerical experiments show that the proposed method provides better interferogram quality in the sense of reduced phase noise and obtain extrapolated interferogram spectra with respect to CB processing.
Huizhang Yang, Chengzhi Chen, Shengyao Chen, Feng Xi, Zhong Liu 0001
IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens.1
2018 Quadrature Compressive Sampling SAR Imaging
abstract
This paper presents a quadrature compressive sampling (QuadCS) and associated fast imaging scheme for synthetic aperture radar (SAR). Different from other analog-to-information conversions (AIC), QuadCS AICs using independent spreading signals sample the SAR echoes due to different transmitted pulses. Then the resulting sensing matrix has lower correlation between any two columns than that by a fixed spreading signal, and better SAR image can be reconstructed. With proper setting of the spreading signals in QuadCS, the sensing matrix has the structures suitable for fast computation of matrix-vector multiplication operations, which leads to a fast image reconstruction. The performance of the proposed scheme is assessed using real SAR image. The reconstructed SAR images with only one-fourth of the Nyquist data achieve the image quality similar to that of the classical SAR images with Nyquist samples.
Huizhang Yang, Shengyao Chen, Feng Xi, Zhong Liu 0001
IGARSS1