Sparse SAR Imaging and Quantitative Evaluation Based on Nonconvex and TV Regularization

Sparse signal processing has been used in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging due to the maturity of compressed sensing theory. As a typical sparse reconstruction method, L1 regularization generally causes bias effects as well as ignoring region-based features. Our team has proposed to linearly combine the nonconvex penalty and the total variation (TV)-norm penalty as a compound regularizer in the imaging model, called nonconvex and TV regularization, which can not only reduce the bias caused by L1 regularization but also enhance point-based and region-based features. In this paper, we use the variable splitting scheme and modify the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), generating a novel algorithm to solve the above optimization problem. Moreover, we analyze the radiometric properties of sparse-signal-processing-based SAR imaging results and introduce three indexes suitable for sparse SAR imaging for quantitative evaluation. In experiments, we process the Gaofen-3 (GF-3) data utilizing the proposed method, and quantitatively evaluate the reconstructed SAR image quality. Experimental results and image quality analysis verify the effectiveness of the proposed method in improving the reconstruction accuracy and the radiometric resolution without sacrificing the spatial resolution.