Resolution Enhancement for Forwarding Looking Multi-Channel SAR Imagery With Exploiting Space–Time Sparsity

Forward-looking multi-channel synthetic aperture radar (FLMC-SAR) is of the capability to achieve unambiguous 2-D images in the forward-looking slight direction. FLMC-SAR imagery usually suffers from relatively low spatial resolution as only limited Doppler diversity can be generated from the synthetic aperture. In this article, a sparsity-driven resolution enhancement algorithm is proposed to improve the resolution FLMC-SAR image of the forward-looking area. Different from conventional beamforming processing to resolve the FLMC-SAR left–right ambiguity, a Bayesian sparsity reconstruction optimization is developed for jointly ambiguity resolving and resolution enhancement in the azimuth angle image domain. The spatial structure of the target in the preliminary image domain is used as the signal sparsity with prior information to solve the constrained optimization problem for FLMC-SAR image resolution enhancement. A local least square estimator of the prior noise and signal statistics in the FLMC-SAR nonisotropic image is established in terms of determining the sparsity weight parameter. Extensive simulation and real FLMC-SAR data experiments confirm that the proposed algorithm is capable of achieving the unambiguous and resolution-enhanced FLMC-SAR image.