GPR Clutter Removal Based on Factor Group-Sparse Regularization

Abstract

Clutter removal is of vital importance to underground detection via ground penetrating radar (GPR) since the target response is usually overwhelmed by strong clutter. The low-rank and sparse decomposition (LRSD) method, which decomposes the GPR data into a low-rank background matrix and a sparse target matrix, has been applied in GPR. However, the existing LRSD-based methods, such as robust principal component analysis (RPCA) and robust non-negative matrix factorization, are sensitive to the regularization parameter or have high computation complexity. In this letter, a novel clutter removal based on factor group-sparse regularization is proposed. It uses a nonconvex matrix factorization as a surrogate for the matrix rank rather than the nuclear norm as in the RPCA. It has good efficiency and robustness to the parameters. Simulation and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method has higher performance in terms of the improvement factor values and lower computational complexity than the state-of-the-art methods.