Image resolution is the key point for the 3-D synthetic aperture radar (SAR) application, especially in small-scale scene observation. The traditional filter-based image enhancement algorithms used for 3-D SAR may suffer from quality degeneration in case of parameter mismatch. This paper proposes a robust and efficient convolutional neural network (CNN) based U-net framework for 3-D SAR image enhancement. The U-net extracts image features in down sampling and up sampling, which is realized by max pooling and deconvolution layers. We use the mean square error(MSE) as the loss function to estimate the difference between the predicted images and the label, while Adam optimizer updates parameters to achieve the global minimum MSE. Both simulation and measured data verify the effectiveness of the network. The results demonstrate that the U-net outperform some traditional filter-based algorithms.

High-resolution imaging of the corner-hidden moving target makes tremendous sense in the fields of urban sensing and autonomous driving. In this paper, a joint No-line-of-sight (NLOS) model and inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imaging method are proposed for millimeter-wave (MMW) imaging of the hidden moving target. In the scheme, a classical threshold method is used to remove the interference signals of the stationary background and extract the triple-reflected echo of the hidden moving target. Then, the image focusing on the moving target is achieved by the range migration algorithm (RMA) with the mirror projection of the wall. Finally, a near-field NLOS experiment system for the hidden rotating target was constructed by TI MMW sensors. The effectiveness of the method is verified by these experiments.

Integrating compressed sensing (CS) with millimeter-wave (mmW) holography has shown great potential to achieve lightweight onboard hardware, low sampling ratio, and high-speed sensing. However, conventional CS-driven algorithms are always limited by nontrivial adjusting of parameters and excessive computational cost caused by plenty of iterations. To address this problem, we propose a lightweight model-based deep learning framework (LFIST-Net) for mmW 3-D holography, by combining the interpretability of fast iterative shrinkage-thresholding algorithm (FISTA) and tuning-free merit of data-driven deep neural network. First, the single-frequency (SF) holographic imaging technique is integrated into FISTA, which serves as the sensing kernels, to avoid large-scale matrix multiplications. Subsequently, the kernel-based FISTA (KFISTA) is mapped into layer-fixed and parameter-learnable LFIST-Net, whose weights are relaxed to be layer-varied. The updating of key parameters in LFIST-Net, including step sizes, thresholds, and momentum coefficients, are regularized by soft-plus function to ensure the non-negativity and monotonicity. As for 3-D holography implementation, the “1-D + 2-D” scheme is adopted, where the matched filtering (MF) and well-trained LFIST-Net are used for range focusing and reconstructions of azimuth slices. Without losing efficiency, the range-focused subechoes are processed parallelly in 3-D cube form. Experiments, including both simulated and measured tests based on a commercial mmW radar, prove that LFIST-Net is capable of reconstructing the imaging scene precisely. In particular, in near-field mmW 3-D holography tests, both numerical and visual results demonstrate LFIST-Net yields compelling reconstruction performance while maintaining high computational speed compared with MF-based, conventional CS-driven, and network-based methods.

Compressed sensing (CS) demonstrates significant potential to improve image quality in 3-D millimeter-wave imaging compared with conventional matched filtering (MF). However, existing sparsity-driven 3-D imaging algorithms always suffer from large-scale storage, excessive computational cost, and nontrivial tuning of parameters due to the huge-dimensional matrix–vector multiplication in complicated iterative optimization steps. In this article, we present a novel range migration (RM) kernel-based iterative-shrinkage thresholding network, dubbed as RMIST-Net, by combining the traditional model-based CS method and data-driven deep learning method for near-field 3-D millimeter-wave (mmW) sparse imaging. First, the measurement matrices in ISTA optimization steps are replaced by RM kernels, by which matrix–vector multiplication is converted to the Hadamard product. Then, the modified ISTA optimization is unrolled into a deep hierarchical architecture, in which all parameters are learned automatically instead of manually tuned. Subsequently, 1000 pairs of oracle images with randomly distributed targets and their corresponding echoes are simulated to train the network. A well-trained RMIST-Net produces high-quality 3-D images from range-focused echoes. Finally, we experimentally prove that RMIST-Net is capable process$512 \times 512$large-scale imaging tasks within 1 s. Besides, we compare RMIST-Net with other state-of-the-art methods in near-field 3-D imaging applications. Both simulations and real-measured experiments demonstrate that RMIST-Net produces impressive reconstruction performance while maintaining high computational speed compared with conventional and sparse imaging algorithms.

Inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imaging and autofocusing are challenging under sparse aperture (SA) conditions. Traditional imaging or autofocusing methods fail to obtain satisfying results due to the nonuniform and incomplete data caused by SA. To address this problem, a novel compressive sensing (CS)-based imaging and autofocusing framework is proposed to obtain high cross-range resolution for SA ISAR. To achieve well-focused imaging results of better performance and higher efficiency simultaneously, we merge the phase error estimation into the CS framework, then iteratively solve the compound CS problem in matrix form with approximate message-passing (AMP), dubbed as AF-AMP. Moreover, a deep learning approach is also proposed by mapping AF-AMP into a deep network, dubbed as AF-AMPNet, with extensive modifications to further improve the efficiency. The adaptively and layer-wisely optimal parameters learned by the training process are also promising to enhance the performance and robustness against noise. Besides, the loss function for training is subjoined with regularized$\ell _{1} $and$\ell _{2} $constraints to ensure the sparsity and quality of imaging results. Furthermore, the proposed AF-AMP and corresponding network-based AF-AMPNet are verified by simulated and measured experiments, both of which show superior performance, robustness, and higher efficiency than other state-of-the-art methods. AF-AMPNet can achieve the best performance in much less computational time.

ISAR autofocusing is the key step for automatically estimating and compensating phase error in received echo, which can improve the imaging quality of scattered points. In recent years, convolutional neural network (CNN) has been widely utilized in signal processing, leading to considerable improvement for traditional methods. This paper proposes a robust and efficient CNN-based ISAR autofocusing method, which combines the feature learning and denoising capabilities of U-net, and modifies it based on autofocusing requirements, to enhance the quality of preliminary imaging results efficiently. Experiments of simulated and measured data verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. For a variety of ISAR imaging results, compared with traditional autofocusing algorithms, the proposed method can eliminate phase errors, reduce side lobes and improve imaging quality more effectively and efficiently.

The emerging field of combining compressed sensing (CS) and three-dimensional synthetic aperture radar (3D SAR) imaging has shown significant potential to reduce sampling rate and improve image quality. However, the conventional CS-driven algorithms are always limited by huge computational costs and non-trivial tuning of parameters. In this article, to address this problem, we propose a two-path iterative framework dubbed TPSSI-Net for 3D SAR sparse imaging. By mapping the AMP into a layer-fixed deep neural network, each layer of TPSSI-Net consists of four modules in cascade corresponding to four steps of the AMP optimization. Differently, the Onsager terms in TPSSI-Net are modified to be differentiable and scaled by learnable coefficients. Rather than manually choosing a sparsifying basis, a two-path convolutional neural network (CNN) is developed and embedded in TPSSI-Net for nonlinear sparse representation in the complex-valued domain. All parameters are layer-varied and optimized by end-to-end training based on a channel-wise loss function, bounding both symmetry constraint and measurement fidelity. Finally, extensive SAR imaging experiments, including simulations and real-measured tests, demonstrate the effectiveness and high efficiency of the proposed TPSSI-Net.

Compressive Sensing(CS) has been widely utilized in Inverse synthetic aperture radar(ISAR) imaging since real ISAR data is easier to be non-completed, and CS-based methods can obtain high-quality imaging results using under-sampled data. However, traditional CS-based methods need pre-defined parameters, sparse transforms and iterative reconstruction processes. Optimal parameters as well as transforms are tough to be hand-crafted, and iterative reconstruction consumes plenty of time, which limit practical applications in ISAR imaging. Given that Convolution Neural Network(CNN) has great power to learn rapidly, we compose CNN with traditional Iterative Shrinkage-Thresholding Algorithm(ISTA) to propose CNN-ISTA(CIST)-based ISAR imaging method. CIST is capable of learning optimal parameters and transforms throughout the training (i.e. the optimization process is interpretable) instead of manually defined. Compared with traditional state-of-the-art CS imaging methods, the experimental results demonstrate that our proposed CIST-based imaging method is superior in both imaging quality and computational efficiency.

Compressed sensing theory has attracted extensive attention in the field of linear array 3-D Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) sparse imaging. However, conventional CS-based algorithms always suffer from quite huge computational cost. In this paper, we propose a new method for 3-D SAR sparse imaging based on convolutional neural network (CNN). Inspired by the work of ISTA-NET, a complex-valued version for imaging tasks is modified. Furthermore, we introduce a approximate phase correction scheme for 3-D imaging, it makes the proposed method works with only a constant measurement matrix corresponding to any slice. Moreover, Using a random training strategy, ISTA-NET networks for 3-D SAR imaging are effectively trained. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms conventional ISTA large margins in both accuracy and speed.

High resolution imaging of interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) usually requires fine focusing and phase-preserving. Time-domain back projection (TDBP) method outperforms other conventional methods at focusing and phase-preserving, but suffer from huge computational complexity when the underlying scene is large. In this article, an efficient method exploiting by frequency-domain back projection (FDBP) is presented for high-resolution InSAR imaging. In the scheme, the coherent integration of focusing is efficient achieved by frequency-domain Fourier transform, and a delayed-distance is compensated to phase-preserving of InSAR. Simulation and experiment results demonstrates that FDBP algorithm improves the computational efficiency by three times while maintaining the similar focusing accuracy compared with the conventional TDBP method.