Cross-Range Resolution Enhancement for DBS Imaging in a Scan Mode Using Aperture-Extrapolated Sparse Representation

This letter addresses the problem of cross-range superresolution in Doppler beam sharpening (DBS). The coherence of echoes in the azimuth direction and the sparsity of the DBS image in the Doppler domain are fully exploited; thus, a superresolution DBS imaging framework using aperture-extrapolated sparse representation (SR) is proposed. In this framework, aperture extrapolation based on the autoregressive model is utilized to predict the forward and backward information in the azimuth direction, and SR is exploited to extract the Doppler spectrum information. In addition, the resolution ability with different coherent processing intervals is analyzed. The sharpening ratio in this proposed algorithm can be improved by a factor of two or four theoretically in comparison with the conventional DBS imaging method. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework can lead to noticeable performance improvement.