Compressive sampling and $l_1$ minimization for SAR imaging with low sampling rate

Abstract

This paper presents a new Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imaging system based on compressive sampling scheme and $l_1$ minimization. The compressive sampling scheme comprises of randomization and integration of radar echoes which slows down the analog-to-digital converters (ADC) rate significantly without an aliasing in image formation. Numerical experiments indicate that the resolution of SAR images retrieved by our method outperform that obtained by conventional methods. The results also reveal that the new SAR imaging system can still retrieve non-ambiguous images even when the data rate is $\frac{1}{10}$ of the original one. Finally, we applied the new method on raw data of RADARSAT-1 to testify its practicability.