A new sparse Bayesian learning method for inverse synthetic aperture radar imaging via exploiting cluster patterns

The application of sparse representation to SAR/ISAR imaging has attracted much attention over the past few years. This new class of sparse representation based imaging methods present a number of unique advantages over conventional range-Doppler methods, the basic idea behind these works is to formulate SAR/ISAR imaging as a sparse signal recovery problem. In this paper, we propose a new two-dimensional pattern-coupled sparse Bayesian learning(SBL) method to capture the underlying cluster patterns of the ISAR target images. Based on this model, an expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm is developed to infer the maximum a posterior (MAP) estimate of the hyperparameters, along with the posterior distribution of the sparse signal. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is able to achieve a substantial performance improvement over existing algorithms, including the conventional SBL method.