ABSTRACT Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is widely used for ground observations owing to its all-weather and all-time capabilities. Sparse SAR reconstruction imaging, which can enhance SAR imaging performance, has emerged as a significant research area. The traditional sparse SAR reconstruction imaging method was successfully applied to raw SAR data processing. However, the computational complexity makes sparse reconstruction imaging difficult for large scenes. Meanwhile, because raw data are usually kept confidential, only limited data are available. To address the issue of how to use publicly available complex image data for sparse reconstruction and effectively improve image quality, this study proposes a joint L1- and F-norm edge-preservation-based sparse SAR reconstruction algorithm for complex images. The algorithm uses the gradient descent (GD) technique to optimize the L1-norm regularization and reconstruct the overall image information; the iterative soft thresholding algorithm (ISTA) to optimize the F-norm regularization and reconstruct the high-frequency image information; and fuses the two sets of reconstructed information to obtain SAR reconstructed images with characteristics such as edge preservation, clear texture, and high quality. The results show that, compared with traditional matched filtering (MF) imaging results, the joint L1- and F-norm results obtained for complex images have lower sidelobes, higher signal-to-noise ratio, and better target resolution ability; compared with the F-norm-based sparse SAR reconstruction imaging results, the joint L1- and F-norm method provides images with better edge texture clarity.
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