Array SAR 3-D Sparse Imaging Based on Regularization by Denoising Under Few Observed Data

Array synthetic aperture radar (SAR) 3-D imaging can obtain 3-D information of the target region, which is widely used in environmental monitoring and scattering information measurement. In recent years, with the development of compressed sensing (CS) theory, sparse signal processing is used in array SAR 3-D imaging. Compared with matched filter (MF), sparse SAR imaging can effectively improve image quality. However, sparse imaging based on handcrafted regularization functions suffers from target information loss in few observed SAR data. Therefore, in this article, a general 3-D sparse imaging framework based on regularization by denoising (RED) and proximal gradient descent-type method for array SAR is presented. First, we construct explicit prior terms via state-of-the-art denoising operators instead of regularization functions, which can improve the accuracy of sparse reconstruction and preserve the structure information of the target. Then, different proximal gradient descent-type methods are presented, including a generalized alternating projection (GAP) and an alternating direction method of multiplier (ADMM), which is suitable for high-dimensional data processing. Additionally, the proposed method has robust convergence, which can achieve sparse reconstruction of 3-D SAR in few observed SAR data. Extensive simulations and real data experiments are conducted to analyze the performance of the proposed method. The experimental results show that the proposed method has superior sparse reconstruction performance.