Radar imaging comparison methods

Abstract

In this work, we are conducting a comparison of different methods to solve a one-dimensional aperture-synthesis radar imaging problem based on simulations. For this purpose, we are going to consider the geometry of the Jicamarca ionospheric radar. These methods are going to be applied to the generation of images of field-aligned plasma irregularities in the equatorial ionosphere, particularly, to the case of Spread-F phenomena. The methods used in the comparison goes from a direct Fourier inversion and a simple numerical integration, to more elaborated algorithms, such as, Capon’s method and Maximum entropy method. We are also going to include in the comparison, the compressed sensing technique using the Haar and dab4 basis, in this case, we are assuming that the brightness function of the spread-F echoes has a sparse representation. In the simulations of the radar measurements, we are considering Gaussian shape brightness functions. The different methods will be compared based on some metrics of the reconstructed images.