Learning-Based Split Unfolding Framework for 3-D mmW Radar Sparse Imaging

Abstract

The application of the compressed sensing (CS) method in the radar field enables the radar imaging system to satisfy both low data cost and high reconstruction quality, however, it is accompanied by enormous iterative operations and difficult adjustments of parameters. In this paper, we propose a learning-based split unfolding framework, dubbed as split iterative sparse reconstruction network (SISR-Net), for near-field 3-D millimeter-wave (mmW) radar sparse imaging. Firstly, a sparse reconstruction algorithm, i.e., SISRA, is proposed to theoretically guide the structure of the imaging framework. Subsequently, by combining the model-based CS method and data-driven deep learning method, SISR-Net is constructed by SISRA to produce 3-D mmW radar images efficiently with excellent explainability and generalization ability. Joint the radar-imaging kernel, echo-generation kernel, and the split Bregman method, the efficiency and stability of SISR-Net are guaranteed, all parameters are layer-varied and learned steadily by end-to-end training to improve the convergence and robustness of the imaging network. Simulated data and the echo from a high-resolution mmW radar dataset 3DRIED, are used to train and test the SISR-Net based on the Adam optimizer. For both simulation and extensive 3-D mmW radar measured experiments, the proposed SISR-Net outperforms other state-of-the-art imaging methods in terms of imaging accuracy and generalization ability.