A multipath exploitation technique for SAR in strong point scattering environment

Conventional synthetic aperture radars (SAR) which implicitly assume direct path scattering mechanism fail to deal with complicated multipath scenario. This paper presents an innovative compressive sensing based multipath exploitation imaging technique for the point scattering multipath scenario. The proposed technique makes use of prior information of the location of point scatter and establishes an omni-directional scattering multipath model to depict the scenario. Based on the model, an over complete dictionary that account for interaction of the radar, targets and environment can be constructed. The image reconstruction is implemented with the CS technique by solving a convex optimization problem. The proposed technique can effectively solve the target image from each scattering path and at the same time, can significantly reduce data recording time. The new technique is validated by numeric simulations.