High resolution scan mode SAR using compressive sensing

Conventional scan-mode synthetic aperture radar (SAR) covers a large area at the expense of reduced azimuth resolution, compared to other operation modes. In this paper, we develop a high resolution scan-mode SAR using random steering and compressive sensing (CS) based techniques. Our approach randomizes the beam steering pattern of conventional scan-mode SAR in both azimuth and range directions such that each pulse beam illuminates a different, randomly chosen, part of the area of interest. We model the image to be reconstructed as a combination of a sparse and a dense component, and combine sparse recovery with least squares methods to estimate them. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed randomly steered scan-mode SAR can improve imaging resolution without compromising the covered area size.