One-Bit Synthetic Aperture Radar Imaging Based on Fixed-Threshold With Slow-Time Fluctuations

Abstract

Due to the limited resources available on small synthetic aperture radar (SAR) platforms, such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), one-bit SAR imaging has emerged as a promising technique, particularly with the rapid development of low-altitude economy. One-bit SAR is capable of leveraging a very simple and cheap one-bit analog-to-digital converter (ADC) to complete the same sensing task as those in the conventional SAR using high-resolution ADC. Nevertheless, the one-bit quantization incurs some intractable problems, such as signal amplitude distortion and the emergence of unwanted interference, which seriously degrade the SAR image quality. To tackle these problems, this work proposes a one-bit SAR imaging strategy that devises a quantization threshold fixed in fast-time but fluctuating in slow-time. Specifically, within the one-bit quantization procedure for each echo pulse, the threshold is fixed, significantly simplifying the SAR system. On the other hand, the slow-time fluctuation of the threshold enables the SAR to reassign spectrum energies, effectively suppressing unwanted interference. The frequency of the threshold and the corresponding pulse repetition frequency (PRF) of the SAR system are elaborately designed. In addition, the fluctuation range of the threshold, which determines the fidelity of SAR images directly, is designed as well, and a closed-form expression for the threshold fluctuation range is determined. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is demonstrated through the simulated and real-data experiments, confirming that high-quality one-bit SAR images can be achieved.