Enhanced Radar Imaging in Uncertain Environment: A Descriptive Experiment Design Regularization Approach

Abstract

A new robust technique for high‐resolution reconstructive imaging is developed as required for enhanced remote sensing (RS) with imaging array radar or/and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) operating in an uncertain RS environment. The operational scenario uncertainties are associated with the unknown statistics of perturbations of the signal formation operator (SFO) in turbulent medium, imperfect array calibration, finite dimensionality of measurements, uncontrolled antenna vibrations, and random carrier trajectory deviations in the case of SAR. We propose new descriptive experiment design regularization (DEDR) approach to treat the uncertain radar image enhancement/reconstruction problems. The proposed DEDR incorporates into the minimum risk (MR) nonparametric estimation strategy the experiment design‐motivated operational constraints algorithmically coupled with the worst‐case statistical performance (WCSP) optimization‐based regularization. The MR objective functional is constrained by the WCSP information, and the robust DEDR image reconstruction operator applicable to the scenarios with the low‐rank uncertain estimated data correlation matrices is found. We report and discuss some simulation results related to enhancement of the uncertain SAR imagery indicative of the significantly increased performance efficiency gained with the developed approach.