Compressive Sensing of Tomographic SAR

high-resolution Data
Marcello Goncalves Costa
March 2015

Overview

In recent years, three-dimensional imaging by means of SAR tomography has become a field of intensive
research. It extends the synthetic aperture principle of SAR into the elevation direction for 3-D imaging.
The high anisotropy of the 3-D tomographic resolution element results in signals sparse in the elevation
direction. Therefore, Compressive sensing (CS) is a new and attractive method for TomoSAR. It exploits
the sparsity or compressibility of a signal to reduce both the sampling rate and the amount of data
generated, reducing data storage size as well as transmission bandwidth [1], [2], [3], [4].
This theory was proposed by Donoho in 2006, as a combined method of data acquisition and compression for reconstruction from incomplete sets of linear measurements by a nonlinear recovery algorithm [1], [3]. There are three main steps for CS: 1. sparsity expression of the original signal; 2. Low
dimension measures to the original signal; and 3. Application of an effective reconstruction algorithm to
recover the original signal [5].
The potential of CS in radar lies on applications where signals are compressible and sparse. Some
relevant publications that explore this point in tomographic SAR are presented by (Aguilera et al.,2011)
that explore the inter-signal correlations of polarimetric channels by means of Distributed Compressed
Sensing (DCS) to enables the joint recovery of multi-signal [6], (Aguilera et al.,2012) focuses on sparse
expansions of cross-range distribution in the wavelet domain using fully polarimetric SAR for 3-D reconstruction of forested areas [7], (Khwaja and Ma) apply online SAR data compression using curvelets in
offline recovery to be used for both high and low SAR resolution [8] and finally, (Zhu and Bamler, 2010)
uses the CS algorithm with L1 norm-regularization for TomoSAR with very high-resolution.

Proposal Idea

Use the compressive sensing approach with optimizations for data acquisition and compression of highresolution tomography SAR data.

2.1

Objectives

Develop a CS method for Tomographic SAR data to achieve high compression ratio and an effective
signal recover. It can reduce the storage onboard data and allow the real-time operation for transmission.
The specific purposes are:
1. Study suitable sparse basis to represent the available signals for analysis;
2. Develop an efficient signal reconstruction algorithm for a predetermined distortion level;
3. Implement the purposed CS in experimental tests in order to analyse the performance (compression
gain, quality and real-time operation).

2.2

Methodology

The proposal methodology consists of researches to developing simulation methods for compressive sensing
SAR data based on the correlated literature and interaction with the SAR research group. The results
obtained from the simulations will be used to implement a practical model for performance measurements.

2.3

Proposal Schedule
Activity
Research
Simulations
Practical experiments
Publications

2.4

Month 1-2
X

Month 3-4
X
X

Month 5-6
X

Period
Month 7-8
X
X

Month 9-10

Month 11-12

X
X

Type Of Scholar

Doctorate student (sandwich 12 months)

References
[1] C.-h. Chen, Signal and image processing for remote sensing. CRC press, 2012.
[2] L. Anitori, A. Maleki, M. Otten, R. G. Baraniuk, and P. Hoogeboom, Design and analysis of compressed sensing radar detectors, Signal Processing, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 61, no. 4, pp. 813827,
2013.
[3] G. Tang, B. N. Bhaskar, P. Shah, and B. Recht, Compressed sensing off the grid, Information
Theory, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 59, no. 11, pp. 74657490, 2013.
[4] A. Panahi and M. Viberg, Gridless compressive sensing, in Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing
(ICASSP), 2014 IEEE International Conference on, pp. 33853389, IEEE, 2014.
[5] Y. C. Eldar and G. Kutyniok, Compressed sensing: theory and applications. Cambridge University
Press, 2012.
[6] E. A. M. N. A. Reigber, Multi-signal compressed sensing for polarimetric sar tomography., in
Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS), 2011.
[7] E. Aguilera, M. Nannini, and A. Reigber, Wavelet-based compressed sensing for sar tomography of
forested areas, in Synthetic Aperture Radar, 2012. EUSAR. 9th European Conference on, pp. 259
262, VDE, 2012.
[8] A. S. Khwaja and J. Ma, Applications of compressed sensing for sar moving-target velocity estimation
and image compression, Instrumentation and Measurement, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 60, no. 8,
pp. 28482860, 2011.