Multi-Channel Deconvolution for Forward-Looking Phase Array Radar Imaging

Abstract: The cross-range resolution of forward-looking phase array radar (PAR) is limited by the effective antenna beamwidth since the azimuth echo is the convolution of antenna pattern and targets’ backscattering coefficients. Therefore, deconvolution algorithms are proposed to improve the imaging resolution under the limited antenna beamwidth. However, as a typical inverse problem, deconvolution is essentially a highly ill-posed problem which is sensitive to noise and cannot ensure a reliable and robust estimation. In this paper, multi-channel deconvolution is proposed for improving the performance of deconvolution, which intends to considerably alleviate the ill-posed problem of single-channel deconvolution. To depict the performance improvement obtained by multi-channel more effectively, evaluation parameters are generalized to characterize the angular spectrum of antenna pattern or singular value distribution of observation matrix, which are conducted to compare different deconvolution systems. Here we present two multi-channel deconvolution algorithms which improve upon the traditional deconvolution algorithms via combining with multi-channel technique. Extensive simulations and experimental results based on real data are presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed imaging methods.