Ultrawideband Impulse Radar Through-the-Wall Imaging with Compressive Sensing

Abstract

Compressive Sensing (CS) provides a new perspective for addressing radar applications requiring large amount of measurements and long data acquisition time; both issues are inherent in through-the-wall radar imaging (TWRI). Most CS techniques applied to TWRI consider stepped-frequency radar platforms. In this paper, the impulse radar two-dimensional (2D) TWRI problem is cast within the framework of CS and solved by the sparse constraint optimization performed on time-domain samples. Instead of the direct sampling of the time domain signal at the Nyquist rate, the Random Modulation Preintegration architecture is employed for the CS projection measurement, which significantly reduces the amount of measurement data for TWRI. Numerical results for point-like and spatially extended targets show that high-quality reliable TWRI based on the CS imaging approach can be achieved with a number of data points with an order of magnitude less than that required by conventional beamforming using the entire data volume.