System design and first airborne experiment of sparse microwave imaging radar: initial results

In this paper, we mainly study the system design of sparse microwave imaging radar and report some of the preliminary results of airborne experiments performed with it. Sparse microwave imaging radar is a novel concept which introduces the sparse signal processing theory to microwave imaging replacing the conventional matched filtering processing method. With the exploitation of the sparse microwave imaging, the radar system could achieve better performance. As a newly developed concept, the two main types of applications of sparse microwave imaging are found in adopting the sparse signal processing theory to current radar systems, and in designing an optimized sparse microwave imaging system. Here we are trying the latter that mainly aims at lower PRF and wider swath. We first introduce the theories of sparse microwave imaging radar and its imaging algorithm. Then we discuss the system designing principles, including the sampling scheme, signal bandwidth,SNR and multi-channel mode. Based on the relationships of these parameters, we provide a design example of radar parameters. In the end, we exploit an airborne experiment using our designed radar system with jittered azimuth sampling strategy. Some preliminary analysis from the experiment result is also provided.