Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar Sparse Imaging Exploiting the Group Dictionary Learning

Sparse imaging relies on sparse representations of the target scenes to be imaged. Predefined dictionaries have long been used to transform radar target scenes into sparse domains, but the performance is limited by the artificially designed or existing transforms, e.g., Fourier transform and wavelet transform, which are not optimal for the target scenes to be sparsified. The dictionary learning (DL) technique has been exploited to obtain sparse transforms optimized jointly with the radar imaging problem. Nevertheless, the DL technique is usually implemented in a manner of patch processing, which ignores the relationship between patches, leading to the omission of some feature information during the learning of the sparse transforms. To capture the feature information of the target scenes more accurately, we adopt image patch group (IPG) instead of patch in DL. The IPG is constructed by the patches with similar structures. DL is performed with respect to each IPG, which is termed as group dictionary learning (GDL). The group oriented sparse representation (GOSR) and target image reconstruction are then jointly optimized by solving a l(1) norm minimization problem exploiting GOSR, during which a generalized Gaussian distribution hypothesis of radar image reconstruction error is introduced to make the imaging problem tractable. The imaging results using the real ISAR data show that the GDL-based imaging method outperforms the original DL-based imaging method in both imaging quality and computational speed.