Spectrum recovery for clutter removal in penetrating radar imaging

Penetrating radar systems are widely employed to scan the objects that are placed behind or buried inside mediums (such as walls, ground, and so on). As the clutter is much stronger than the target echo, clutter removal must be performed before imaging. The moving average subtraction, spatial notch filtering, and singular value decomposition methods are commonly used to remove clutter. However, the drawback is that these methods eliminate some of the target spectrum information, which causes target energy losses and generates side lobes. To solve this problem, two spectrum recovery methods are proposed in this paper. The first method recovers the spectrum magnitude and phase via sinc interpolation and linear fitting, respectively, which is fast and suitable for real-time processing. Although the second method recovers the spectrum based on matrix completion with prior information, which is more accurate and more computational expensive. Extensive simulations and experiments are presented to validate the proposed methods. The results show that the proposed methods can improve various traditional clutter removal methods, the side lobes are clearly suppressed, and the signal-to-clutter ratio is significantly improved.