Sparse three-dimensional imaging for forward-looking array SAR using spatial continuity

For forward-looking array synthetic aperture radar (FASAR), the scattering intensity of ground scatterers fluctuates greatly since there are kinds of vegetations and topography on the surface of the ground, and thus the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of its echo signals corresponding to different vegetations and topography also varies obviously. Owing to the reason known to all, the performance of the sparse reconstruction of compressed sensing (CS) becomes worse in the case of lower SNR, and the quality of the sparse three-dimensional imaging for FASAR would be affected significantly in the practical application. In this paper, the spatial continuity of the ground scatterers is introduced to the sparse recovery algorithm of CS in the three-dimensional imaging for FASAR, in which the weighted least square method of the cubic interpolation is used to filter out the bad and isolated scatterer. The simulation results show that the proposed method can realize the sparse three-dimensional imaging of FASAR more effectively in the case of low SNR.