An augmented Lagrangian method for complex-valued compressed SAR imaging

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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TCI.2016.2580498

In this paper, we present a solution to the complex synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging problem within a constrained optimization formulation where the objective function includes a combination of the ℓ1-norm and the total variation of the magnitude of the complex valued reflectivity field. The technique we present relies on recent advances in the solution of optimization problems, based on Augmented Lagrangian Methods, and in particular on the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM). We rigorously derive the proximal mapping operators, associated with a linear transform of the magnitude of the reflectivity vector and magnitude-total-variation cost functions, for complex-valued SAR images, and thus enable the use of ADMM techniques to obtain computationally efficient solutions for radar imaging. We study the proposed techniques with multiple features (sparse and piecewise-constant in magnitude) based on a weighted sum of the 1-norm and magnitude-total-variation. We derive a fast implementation of the algorithm using only two transforms per iteration for problems admitting unitary transforms as forward models. Experimental results on real data from TerraSAR-X and SARPER-airborne SAR system developed by ASELSAN-demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.