Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is a high-resolution imaging sensor commonly mounted on platforms such as airplanes and satellites for widespread use. In complex electromagnetic environments, radio frequency interference (RFI) severely degrades the quality of SAR images due to its widely varying bandwidth and numerous unknown emission sources. Although traditional deep learning-based methods have achieved remarkable results by directly processing SAR images as visual ones, there is still considerable room for improvement in their performance due to the wide coverage and high intensity of RFI. To address these issues, this paper proposes the fusion of segmentation and inpainting networks (FuSINet) to suppress SAR RFI in the time-frequency domain. Firstly, to weaken the dominance of RFI in SAR images caused by high-intensity interference, a simple CCN-based network is employed to learn and segment the RFI. This results in the removal of most of the original interference, leaving blanks that allow the targets to regain dominance in the overall image. Secondly, considering the wide coverage characteristic of RFI, a U-former network with global information capture capabilities is utilized to learn the content covered by the interference and fill in the blanks created by the segmentation network. Compared to the traditional Transformer, this paper enhances its global information capture capabilities through shift-windows and down-sampling layers. Finally, the segmentation and inpainting networks are fused together through a weighted parameter for joint training. This not only accelerates the learning speed but also enables better coordination between the two networks, leading to improved RFI suppression performance. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the substantial performance enhancement of the proposed FuSINet. Compared to the PISNet+, the proposed attention mechanism achieves a 2.49 dB improvement in peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR). Furthermore, compared to Uformer, the FuSINet achieves an additional 4.16 dB improvement in PSNR.
Synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) can work in all weather conditions and at all times, and satellite-borne radar has the characteristics of short revisiting period and large imaging width. Therefore, satellite-borne synthetic-aperture radar has been widely deployed, and the SAR images have been widely used in geographic mapping, radar interpretation, ship detection, and other fields. Satellite-borne synthetic-aperture radar is also susceptible to various types of intentional or unintentional interference during the imaging process, and because the interference is a direct wave, its power is much stronger than the wave reflected by targets. As a common interference pattern, radio-frequency interference widely exists in various satellite-borne synthetic-aperture radars, which seriously deteriorates SAR image quality. In order to solve the above problems, this paper proposes a feature decomposition network to suppress interference based on regularization optimization. The contributions of this work are as follows: 1. By analyzing the performance limitations of the existing methods, this work proposes a novel regularization method for radio-frequency interference suppression tasks. From the perspective of data distribution histograms and residual components, the proposed method eliminates the variable components introduced by common regularization, greatly reduces the difficulty of data mapping, and significantly improves its robustness and performance. 2. This work proposes a feature decomposition network, where the feature decomposition module contains two parts; one part only represents the interference signal, and the other part only represents the radar signal. The neurons representing the interference signal are discarded, and the neurons representing the radar signal are used as input for the subsequent network. A cosine similarity constraint is used to separate the interference from the network as much as possible. Finally, this method is validated on the MiniSAR dataset and Sentinel-1A dataset.
Synthetic aperture radar (SAR), as a high-resolution microwave remote sensing imaging technology, plays an indispensable role in both military and civilian applications. However, in complex electromagnetic countermeasure environments, radio frequency interference (RFI) severely degrades SAR imaging quality. SAR anti-interference, as a countermeasure method, has significantly practical values. Although deep learning-based anti-interference techniques have demonstrated notable advantages, two key issues remain unresolved: 1. Strong coupling between interference suppression and SAR imaging—most existing methods rely on raw echo data, leading to a complex processing pipeline and error accumulation. 2. Scarcity of labeled data—the lack of high-quality labeled data severely restricts model deployment. To address these challenges, this work constructs a standardized dataset and conducts comprehensive validation experiments based on this dataset. The main contributions are as follows: Firstly, this work establishes the mathematical model for block-type interference, laying a theoretical foundation for the subsequent construction of RFI-polluted data. Secondly, this work constructs a block-type interference dataset, which includes the labeled data constructed by our laboratory and open-source data from the Sentinel-1 satellites, providing reliable data support for deep learning. Thirdly, this work proposes an image subspace-based interference suppression method, which eliminates the dependence on raw echo data and significantly simplifies the processing pipeline. Finally, this work makes a fair comparison of the current works, summarizes the existing problems, and looks forward to possible future research directions.
This article is devoted to solving full-wave electromagnetic inverse scattering problems (EM-ISPs), which determine the geometrical and physical properties of scatterers from the knowledge of scattered fields. Due to the intrinsic ill-posedness and nonlinearity of EM-ISPs, traditional non-iterative and iterative methods struggle to meet the requirements of high accuracy and real-time reconstruction. To overcome these issues, we propose a two-step contrast source learning approach, cascading convolutional neural networks (CNNs) into the inversion framework, to tackle 2D full-wave EM-ISPs. In the first step, a contrast source network based on the CNNs architecture takes the determined part of the contrast source as input and then outputs an estimate of the total contrast source. Then, the recovered total contrast source is directly converted into the initial contrast. In the second step, the rough initial contrast obtained beforehand is input into the U-Net for refinement. Consequently, the EM-ISPs can be quickly solved with much higher accuracy, even for high-contrast objects, almost achieving real-time imaging. Numerical examples have demonstrated that the proposed two-step contrast source learning approach is able to improve accuracy and robustness even for high-contrast scatterers. The proposed approach offers a promising avenue for advancing EM-ISPs by integrating strengths from both traditional and deep learning-based approaches, to achieve real-time quantitative microwave imaging for high-contrast objects.