Joint Low-Rank and Sparse Tensors Recovery for Video Synthetic Aperture Radar Imaging

Video synthetic aperture radar (SAR) receives more and more attention in recent years because it can provide continuous images of the observed scene. However, the enormous data of video SAR to obtain the multiframe images bring big challenges to its transmission, storage, and processing, especially for small unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platform. In this article, we aim at proposing an efficient video formation method for video SAR systems with reduced data. First, the characteristics of video SAR observed scene are analyzed. It is found that the observed scene with multiple frames can be modeled as the sum of a low-rank tensor and a sparse tensor efficiently. After that, the video formation problem for video SAR is modeled as a joint low-rank and sparse tensors recovery problem. Finally, an efficient tensor alternating direction method of multiplier is proposed to obtain the final SAR video. Compared with the traditional frequency- or time-domain imaging methods, the amount of data samples can be greatly reduced. On the other hand, the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art SAR imaging methods with reduced samples, including the joint low-rank and sparse matrices recovery method and the low-rank tensor recovery method. Numerical simulations validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.