A new method for SAR radio frequency interference mitigation based on maximum a posterior estimation

Hazardous to synthetic aperture radar (SAR), the radio frequency interference (RFI) significantly degrades the SAR imaging quality and prevents accurate image interpretation. In recent years, RFI mitigation has received intensive attention in the active microwave remote sensing community. Making use of the statistical distribution of RFI and SAR echoes, this paper proposes a new method for RFI suppression based on the maximum a posterior (MAP) estimation. After careful modeling of sparse prior and data likelihood, the method performs Bayesian inference of the posterior and estimates the model parameters by MAP. Then, it reconstructs RFI and subtracts it from the raw data. Finally, it obtains well-focused SAR image using the state-of-the-art imaging techniques. The effectiveness of the method has been validated using measured SAR data.