A New Passive Imaging Technique Based on Compressed Sensing for Synthetic Aperture Interferometric Radiometer

The synthesis aperture interferometric technology provides a promising passive imaging approach to the radiometer for reconstructing the brightness temperature distribution of the scene. However, the application of this technology may be limited by the large number of antennas, receivers, and analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) required in the radiometer. In order to reduce the complexity of the hardware requirements, a new passive microwave imaging technique based on compressed sensing (CS) is proposed in this letter. Different from the existing CS-based imaging methods that randomly select part of samples measured by all receivers, the proposed method develops a new practicable measurement matrix that employs the samples measured by partial receivers to recover the brightness temperature image. Numerical simulations and experiments are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for reducing the hardware resources and the data amount while maintaining the image quality.