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P- and L-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensors have foliage- and ground-penetrating imaging capabilities and, thus, contribute to missions, such as deforestation monitoring, biomass estimation, and deformation measurements. The spectrums they employed are also allocated to many services, such as radio navigation satellite services, radio location services, telecommunication, and broadcasting, which is prone to generate harmful radio frequency interference (RFI) to SAR including time stationary narrow band (TSNB) and intermittently transmitted wideband (ITWB) versions. Researchers generally perform on-ground processing to mitigate RFIs by which notch filtering is the best known. However, the phenomena of side-lobe uplift and SNR degradation caused by spectral gaps will deteriorate SAR image quality and further affect image interpretation. This article models and characterizes the signature of TSNB and ITWB RFI in P- and L-band SAR, and on this basis, a two-stage approach is developed to mitigate RFI that overcomes the drawbacks of notch filtering-based approaches. In the first stage, a spectrum cancellation-based RFI detector is proposed, which simultaneously locates RFI and produces an orthogonal projection operator. In the second stage, a low-rank approximation model regulated by truncated nuclear norm, which is solved by the alternating direction method of multipliers, is established to recover the missing spectral information. Experiments are conducted extensively on simulated data as well as real-world data collected by advanced land observing satellite phased-array L-band synthetic aperture radar system and a P-band airborne SAR system to validate the proposed approach.

The electromagnetic environment is becoming complex as the usable spectrum will be allocated for more services. As a result of this situation synthetic aperture radar (SAR) missions are frequently perturbed by radio frequency interference (RFI) that jeopardizes their scientific observations all over the world. The state-of-the-art multichannel SAR has anti-RFI capability since it’s capable of digitally modulating the antenna pattern (AP) in postprocessing, thereby steering the null toward the angle of arrival (AOA) of the RFI in the spatial domain. However, the AOA of RFI is space-variant, meaning that the mitigation performance of beamformers sensitive to AOA will greatly deteriorate. In addition, the AOA of in-swath RFI and the target echo arrive simultaneously, thus the traditional beamformer will generate a distorted AP, deteriorating the SAR imagery. In light of these considerations, this article studies the in-swath and out-of-swath RFIs in elevation multichannel SAR and develops their countermeasures. Thereinto, a least $\ell _{1}$ -norm model is developed to estimate the AOA of the RFI, followed by two schemes developed to separate the RFI. The former develops a beamformer that joint sidelobe control and null expanding to mitigate the space-variant out-of-swaths RFI, whereas the latter develops a blind source separation (BSS)-based technology to mitigate in-swath RFI, avoiding AP distortion and restoring SAR imagery. The effectiveness of the proposed approaches is supported by experiments based on the measured X-band airborne DBF-SAR data as well as the simulated SAR data.