The multichannel or wide-angle imaging performance of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) can be improved by applying the compressed sensing (CS) theory to each channel or sub-aperture image formation independently. However, this not only neglects the complementary information between signals of each channel or sub-aperture, but also may lead to failure in guaranteeing the consistency of the position of a scatterer in different channel or sub-aperture images which will make the extraction of some scattering information become difficult. By exploiting the joint sparsity of the signal ensemble, this paper proposes a novel CS-based method for joint sparse recovery of all channel or sub-aperture images. Solving the joint sparse recovery problem with a modified orthogonal matching pursuit algorithm, the recovery precision of scatterers is effectively improved and the scattering information is also preserved during the image formation process. Finally, the simulation and real data is used for verifying the effectiveness of the proposed method. Compared with single channel or sub-aperture independent CS processing, the proposed method can not only obtain better imaging performance with fewer measurements, but also preserve more valuable scattering information for target recognition.

This paper proposes a new interferometric near-field 3-D imaging approach based on multi-channel joint sparse reconstruction to solve the problems of conventional methods, i.e., the irrespective correlation of different channels in single-channel independent imaging which may lead to deviated positions of scattering points, and the low accuracy of imaging azimuth angle for real anisotropic targets. Firstly, two full-apertures are divided into several sub-apertures by the same standard; secondly, the joint sparse metric function is constructed based on scattering characteristics of the target in multi-channel status, and the improved Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP) method is used for imaging solving, so as to obtain high-precision 3-D image of each sub-aperture; thirdly, comprehensive sub-aperture processing is performed using all sub-aperture 3-D images to obtain the final 3-D images; finally, validity of the proposed approach is verified by using simulation electromagnetic data and data measured in the anechoic chamber. Experimental results show that, compared with traditional interferometric ISAR imaging approaches, the algorithm proposed in this paper is able to provide a higher accuracy in scattering center reconstruction, and can effectively maintain relative phase information of channels.