Parametric reconstruction of arc-shaped structures in synthetic aperture radar imaging

As a basic scattering element, arc-shaped structures can present considerable geometric information of the observed targets in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. The arc-shaped structures of various artificial objects sometimes completely disappear in radar images, which dramatically degrades the applicability of SAR images. Conventionally, multi-aspect observation is required to recover the disappeared structures, but this method is not always effective in some cases. This paper proposes a parametric reconstruction of arc-shaped structures in SAR imaging. The proposed method has the ability to reconstruct disappeared arc-shaped structures via three observations. The core idea is to use the anisotropic phase feature to distinguish the endpoints of arc-shaped structures from multiple point-like targets in the image domain and restore the arc through the scattering model. The method basically includes three procedures: arc-shaped structure recognition, parameter estimation, and target reconstruction. Computer simulations and a microwave anechoic chamber experiment are conducted to examine the effectiveness of the method.