Range-angle Imaging Based on the Prior of Target Scattering Characteristics in Distributed Arrays

We consider the problem of target range-angle imaging using distributed arrays. High resolution imaging requires a large array aperture. However, due to the limited number of array elements, the subarrays are usually sparsely located, which results in severe under-sampling and ambiguity problem, degrading the imaging performance. To this end, we propose a range-angle imaging method based on the prior of target scattering characteristic to resolve the ambiguity. The main idea is to use the information increment of priors to reduce the dependence on the measurements. Particularly, we first statistically extract the prior distribution of target scattering intensity by data analysis on the target images. Then we use these priors to design weighting parameters and achieve the ambiguity-free images by solving a weighted sparse recovery problem. Finally, numerical simulation results verify the feasibility of the proposed method.