Image Reconstruction for Low-Oversampled Staggered SAR via HDM-FISTA

Due to the unequispaced pulse repetition interval (PRI), the low-oversampling ratio and the range-variant blockage, the echo of the low-oversampled staggered SAR (LS-SAR) is nonuniformly sampled with sub-Nyquist and range-variant rate. However, the existing LS-SAR processing methods lack robustness with regards to the scenario type and the PRI variation mode. In this article, a compressive-sensing-based image reconstruction method for the LS-SAR is proposed. First, a hybrid-domain model (HDM) of the LS-SAR echo is presented. In the HDM, the coupled range cell migration (RCM), the unequispaced PRI, and the conflict blockage are formulated as the matrix multiplications with a 3-D tensor, a 2-D matrix, and a Hadamard product, respectively. Based on the HDM, the image reconstruction is realized through the 2-D fast iterative shrinkage thresholding algorithm (ISTA), in which the gradient is derived by exploiting the properties of the tensor and matrix trace. The fast Fourier transform (FFT) and the nonuniform FFT are implemented to accelerate the computation. Due to good accommodation of the RCM and the LS-SAR sampling characteristics, the proposed method can work well for various PRI variation modes and scenario types. Simulations using the point scatter and the distributed target with wide-swath extension demonstrate the effectiveness as well as the robustness of the proposed method.