A Sidelobe Suppression Method for Circular Ground-Based SAR 3D Imaging Based on Sparse Optimization of Radial Phase-Center Distribution

Circular ground-based SAR (GBSAR) is a new 3D imaging GBSAR with the potential of acquiring high-quality 3D SAR images and 3D deformation. However, its donut-shaped spectrum and short radius of antenna rotation cause high sidelobes on 3D curved surfaces, resulting in 3D SAR images with poor quality. The multi-phase-center circular GBSAR with full array can effectively suppress sidelobes by filling the donut-shaped spectrum to be the equivalent solid spectrum, but it requires a larger number of phase centers, increasing system cost and engineering difficulties. In this paper, a sidelobe suppression method for circular GBSAR 3D imaging based on sparse optimization of radial phase-center distribution is proposed to suppress high sidelobes at low cost. By deriving the point spread function (PSF) of multi-phase-center circular GBSAR and taking the peak sidelobe level (PSL) and integrated sidelobe level (ISL) of the derived PSF as multi-objective functions, we solve the multi-objective optimization problem to optimize the sparse distribution of radial phase centers. The advantage of the proposed method is that the solved optimal radial phase-center distribution can effectively suppress the 3D sidelobes of circular GBSAR with a limited number of phase centers. Finally, the sidelobe suppression effect of the proposed method is verified via 3D imaging simulations.