Resolution enhancement for ISAR imaging via improved statistical compressive sensing

Developing compressed sensing (CS) theory reveals that optimal reconstruction of an unknown signal can be achieved from very limited observations by utilizing signal sparsity. For inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR), the image of an interesting target is generally constructed by limited strong scattering centers, representing strong spatial sparsity. Such prior sparsity intrinsically paves a way to improved ISAR imaging performance. In this paper, we develop a super-resolution algorithm for forming ISAR images from limited observations. When the amplitude of the target scattered field follows an identical Laplace probability distribution, the approach converts super-resolution imaging into sparsity-driven optimization in the Bayesian statistics sense. We show that improved performance is achievable by taking advantage of the meaningful spatial structure of the scattered field. Further, we use the nonidentical Laplace distribution with small scale on strong signal components and large scale on noise to discriminate strong scattering centers from noise. A maximum likelihood estimator combined with a bandwidth extrapolation technique is also developed to estimate the scale parameters. Real measured data processing indicates the proposal can reconstruct the high-resolution image though only limited pulses even with low SNR, which shows advantages over current super-resolution imaging methods.