Joint Compressed Sensing and Spread Spectrum Through-the-Wall Radar Imaging

High-resolution radar imaging has to be accomplished within the constraints of aperture size, frequency, and acquisition time. To achieve effective and reliable imaging, we introduce a compressed sensing (CS) technology to spread spectrum through-the-wall radar imaging. Using the sparseness of the spread spectrum through-the-wall radar echo in the correlation domain and the sparsity of the target information in the imaging region, the feasibility of CS technology for reducing the number of observation points and the number of samples per observation point is verified. Moreover, considering the high sensitivity of CS technology to clutter, receiver cancellation is adopted to remove the strong clutter information present in echo signals. The results of numerical simulations show that CS technology can provide very efficient sampling, thereby significantly reducing the amount of data required. Compared to back-projection imaging based on traditional sampling technology, the proposed CS technique can obtain almost the same satisfactory resolution and quality imaging results using only 0.72% of the total data. This will reduce the hardware costs and significantly shorten the data-acquisition and data-transfer times.