SAR Imaging With Structural Sparse Representation

Sparse representation (SR)-based SAR imaging approaches have shown their superior performance compared with conventional approaches. However, for an image with rich spatial structures, a fixed global dictionary is usually ineffective to characterize the local structures. Piecewise autoregressive (PAR) model indicates that each pixel can be linearly represented by its local neighboring pixels. Inspired by this, an adaptive sparse space, effectively characterizing the varying image local structures, is designed, in which the entries are derived from the PAR model. By incorporating the adaptive SR into the SAR imaging, a novel structural SR-based SAR (SSR-SAR) imaging approach is proposed. Due to the fact that the adaptive sparse space is greatly dependent on the prior information of the SAR image, updating of the adaptive sparse space and SAR imaging is a joint optimization problem. In our approach, we propose to introduce the alternative minimization scheme to solve the problem. Besides, the Augmented Lagrangian Multiplier technique is adopted to accelerate the computation speed. Finally, experimental results are shown to demonstrate the validity of the proposed approach.