Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) is a key issue for Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) because it can seriously degrade the imaging quality, leading to the misinterpretation of the target scattering characteristics and hindering the subsequent image analysis. To address this issue, we present a narrow-band interference (NBI) and wide-band interference (WBI) mitigation algorithm based on deep residual network (ResNet). First, the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) is used to characterize the interference-corrupted echo in the time–frequency domain. Then, the interference detection model is built by a classical deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) framework to identify whether there is an interference component in the echo. Furthermore, the time–frequency feature of the target signal is extracted and reconstructed by utilizing the ResNet. Finally, the inverse time–frequency Fourier transform (ISTFT) is utilized to transform the time–frequency spectrum of the recovered signal into the time domain. The effectiveness of the interference mitigation algorithm is verified on the simulated and measured SAR data with strip mode and terrain observation by progressive scans (TOPS) mode. Moreover, in comparison with the notch filtering and the eigensubspace filtering, the proposed interference mitigation algorithm can improve the interference mitigation performance, while reducing the computation complexity.

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is susceptible to radio frequency interference (RFI), which becomes especially commonplace in the increasingly complex electromagnetic environments. RFI severely detracts from SAR imaging quality, which hinders image interpretation. Therefore, some RFI mitigation algorithms have been introduced based on the partial features of RFI, but the RFI reconstruction models in these algorithms are rough and can be improved further. This paper proposes two algorithms for accurately modeling the structural properties of RFI and target echo signal (TES). Firstly, an RFI mitigation algorithm joining the low-rank characteristic and dual-sparsity property (LRDS) is proposed. In this algorithm, RFI is treated as a low-rank and sparse matrix, and the sparse matrix assumption is made for TES in the time–frequency (TF) domain. Compared with the traditional low-rank and sparse models, it can achieve better RFI mitigation performance with less signal loss and accelerated algorithm convergence. Secondly, the other RFI mitigation algorithm, named as TFC-LRS, is proposed to further reduce the signal loss. The TF constraint concept, in lieu of the special sparsity, is introduced in this algorithm to describe the structural distribution of RFI because of its aggregation characteristic in the TF spectrogram. Finally, the effectiveness, superiority, and robustness of the proposed algorithms are verified by RFI mitigation experiments on the simulated and measured SAR datasets.