A Robust Super-Resolution Gridless Imaging Framework for UAV-Borne SAR Tomography

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) tomography (TomoSAR) retrieves three-dimensional (3-D) information from multiple SAR images, effectively addresses the layover problem, and has become pivotal in urban mapping. Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has gained popularity as a TomoSAR platform, offering distinct advantages such as the ability to achieve 3-D imaging in a single flight, cost-effectiveness, rapid deployment, and flexible trajectory planning. The evolution of compressed sensing (CS) has led to the widespread adoption of sparse reconstruction techniques in TomoSAR signal processing, with a focus on ℓ1norm regularization and other grid-based CS methods. However, the discretization of illuminated scene along elevation introduces modeling errors, resulting in reduced reconstruction accuracy, known as the “off-grid" effect. Recent advancements have introduced gridless CS algorithms to mitigate this issue. This paper presents an innovative gridless 3-D imaging framework tailored for UAV-borne TomoSAR. Capitalizing on the pulse repetition frequency (PRF) redundancy inherent in slow UAV platforms, a multiple measurement vectors (MMV) model is constructed to enhance noise immunity without compromising azimuth-range resolution. Given the sparsely placed array elements due to mounting platform constraints, an atomic norm soft thresholding algorithm is proposed for partially observed MMV, offering gridless reconstruction capability and super-resolution. An efficient alternative optimization algorithm is also employed to enhance computational efficiency. Validation of the proposed framework is achieved through computer simulations and flight experiments, affirming its efficacy in UAV-borne TomoSAR applications.