Differentiable Rendering for Synthetic Aperture Radar Imagery

There is rising interest in differentiable rendering, which allows explicitly modeling geometric priors and constraints in optimization pipelines using first-order methods such as backpropagation. Incorporating such domain knowledge can lead to deep neural networks that are trained more robustly and with limited data, as well as the capability to solve ill-posed inverse problems. Existing efforts in differentiable rendering have focused on imagery from electro-optical sensors, particularly conventional RGB-imagery. In this article, we propose an approach for differentiable rendering of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery, which combines methods from 3-D computer graphics with neural rendering. We demonstrate the approach on the inverse graphics problem of 3-D object reconstruction from limited SAR imagery using high-fidelity simulated SAR data.