RPCA-AENet: Clutter Suppression and Simultaneous Stationary Scene and Moving Targets Imaging in the Presence of Motion Errors

Clutter suppression and ground moving target imaging in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system have been receiving increasing attention for both civilian and military applications. The problem of clutter suppression and ground moving target imaging in practical applications is much more challenging due to the motion error of the radar platform. In this article, we focus on the problems of clutter suppression and simultaneous stationary and moving target imaging in the presence of motion errors. Specifically, we propose a robust principal component analysis autoencoder network (RPCA-AENet) in a single-channel SAR system. In RPCA-AENet, the encoder transforms the SAR echo into imaging results of stationary scene and ground moving targets, and the decoder regenerates the SAR echo using the obtained imaging results. The encoder is designed by the unfolded robust principal component analysis (RPCA), while the decoder is formulated into two dense layers and one additional layer. Joint reconstruction loss, entropy loss, and measurement distance loss are utilized to guide the training of the RPCA-AENet. Notably, the algorithm operates in a totally self-supervised form and requires no other labeled SAR data. The methodology was tested on numerical SAR data. These tests show that the proposed architecture outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.