Radar coincidence imaging (RCI) is a high-resolution staring imaging technique without the limitation of relative motion between target and radar. The sparsity-driven approaches are commonly used in RCI, while the prior knowledge of imaging models needs to be known accurately. However, as one of the major model errors, the gain-phase error exists generally, and may cause inaccuracies of the model and defocus the image. In the present report, the sparse auto-calibration method is proposed to compensate the gain-phase error in RCI. The method can determine the gain-phase error as part of the imaging process. It uses an iterative algorithm, which cycles through steps of target reconstruction and gain-phase error estimation, where orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) and Newton’s method are used, respectively. Simulation results show that the proposed method can improve the imaging quality significantly and estimate the gain-phase error accurately.

Radar coincidence imaging (RCI) is a high-resolution staring imaging technique motivated by classical optical coincidence imaging. In RCI, sparse reconstruction methods are commonly used to achieve better imaging result, while the performance guarantee is based on the general assumption that the scatterers are located at the prediscretized grid-cell centers. However, the widely existing off-grid problem degrades the RCI performance considerably. In this paper, an algorithm based on variational sparse Bayesian learning (VSBL) is developed to solve the off-grid RCI. Applying Taylor expansion, the unknown true dictionary is approximated accurately to a linear model. Then target reconstruction is reformulated as a joint sparse recovery problem that recovers three groups of sparse coefficients over three known dictionaries with the constraint of the common support shared by the groups. VSBL is then applied to solve the problem by assigning appropriate priors to the three groups of coefficients. Results of numerical experiments demonstrate that the algorithm can achieve outstanding reconstruction performance and yield superior performance both in suppressing noise and in adapting to off-grid error.

Radar coincidence imaging (RCI) is a high-resolution imaging technique without the limitation of relative motion between target and radar. In sparsity-driven RCI, the prior knowledge of imaging model requires to be known accurately. However, the phase error generally exists as a model error, which may cause inaccuracies of the model and defocus the image. The problem is formulated using Bayesian hierarchical prior modeling, and the self-calibration variational message passing (SC-VMP) algorithm is proposed to improve the performance of RCI with phase error. The algorithm determines the phase error as part of the imaging process. The scattering coefficient and phase error are iteratively estimated using VMP and Newton’s method, respectively. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can estimate the phase error accurately and improve the imaging quality significantly.

Radar coincidence imaging (RCI) is a high-resolution staring imaging technique without the limitation of the target relative motion. To achieve better imaging performance, sparse reconstruction is commonly used. While its performance is based on the assumption that the scatterers are located at the prediscretized grid-cell centers, otherwise, off-grid emerges and the performance of RCI degrades significantly. In this paper, RCI using frequency-hopping (FH) waveforms is considered. The off-grid effects are analyzed, and the corresponding constrained Cramér-Rao bound (CCRB) is derived based on the mean square error (MSE) of the “oracle” estimator. For off-grid RCI, the process is composed of two stages: grid matching and off-grid error (OGE) calibration, where two-dimension (2D) band-excluded locally optimized orthogonal matching pursuit (BLOOMP) and alternating iteration minimization (AIM) algorithms are proposed, respectively. Unlike traditional sparse recovery methods, BLOOMP realizes the recovery in the refinement grids by overwhelming the shortages of coherent dictionary and is robust to noise and OGE. AIM calibration algorithm adaptively adjusts the OGE and, meanwhile, seeks the optimal target reconstruction result.

Originating from traditional optical coincidence imaging, radar coincidence imaging (RCI) is a staring/forward-looking imaging technique. In RCI, the reference matrix must be computed precisely to reconstruct the image as preferred; unfortunately, such precision is almost impossible due to the existence of model mismatch in practical applications. Although some conventional sparse recovery algorithms are proposed to solve the model-mismatch problem, they are inapplicable to nonsparse targets. We therefore sought to derive the signal model of RCI with model mismatch by replacing the sparsity constraint item with total variation (TV) regularization in the sparse total least squares optimization problem; in this manner, we obtain the objective function of RCI with model mismatch for an extended target. A more robust and efficient algorithm called TV-TLS is proposed, in which the objective function is divided into two parts and the perturbation matrix and scattering coefficients are updated alternately. Moreover, due to the ability of TV regularization to recover sparse signal or image with sparse gradient, TV-TLS method is also applicable to sparse recovering. Results of numerical experiments demonstrate that, for uniform extended targets, sparse targets, and real extended targets, the algorithm can achieve preferred imaging performance both in suppressing noise and in adapting to model mismatch.

Radar coincidence imaging (RCI) is a staring imaging technique that originated from optical coincidence imaging. In RCI, the reference matrix needs to be computed precisely to reconstruct the image. However, it is difficult to exactly calculate the reference matrix as model mismatch existing in most applications. The signal model of RCI with model mismatch is derived. Based on a Bayesian framework and regularization method, an algorithm called regularization-focal underdetermined system solver (R-FOCUSS) is proposed to solve the RCI problem with model mismatch. In the proposed method, the scattering coefficients and the perturbation matrix can be calculated during the iterations, so the image can be reconstructed. A norm-ratio method is also proposed to determine the regularization parameters in the objective function, which makes the algorithm suitable for the situation, where the distributions of noise, model error, and target’s sparsity are unknown. The constrained Cramér–Rao bound for scatterer estimation is derived. Compared with some existing sparse reconstruction methods, R-FOCUSS is more robust, with a lower computation complexity. Results of numerical experiments demonstrate that the algorithm can achieve outstanding imaging performance and yields superior performance both in suppressing noise and in adapting to model mismatch.