Off-Grid Radar Coincidence Imaging Based on Variational Sparse Bayesian Learning

Radar coincidence imaging (RCI) is a high-resolution staring imaging technique motivated by classical optical coincidence imaging. In RCI, sparse reconstruction methods are commonly used to achieve better imaging result, while the performance guarantee is based on the general assumption that the scatterers are located at the prediscretized grid-cell centers. However, the widely existing off-grid problem degrades the RCI performance considerably. In this paper, an algorithm based on variational sparse Bayesian learning (VSBL) is developed to solve the off-grid RCI. Applying Taylor expansion, the unknown true dictionary is approximated accurately to a linear model. Then target reconstruction is reformulated as a joint sparse recovery problem that recovers three groups of sparse coefficients over three known dictionaries with the constraint of the common support shared by the groups. VSBL is then applied to solve the problem by assigning appropriate priors to the three groups of coefficients. Results of numerical experiments demonstrate that the algorithm can achieve outstanding reconstruction performance and yield superior performance both in suppressing noise and in adapting to off-grid error.