Experimental studies of compressive sensing for SAR with Ka-band chamber room and Ku-band airplane SAR data

Compressive sensing (CS) is one of the solutions for reducing the data rate of sensor systems. In our previous study, there were certain issues yet to be addressed in the analysis of accuracy of CS reconstruction comparing with original synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. In this paper, we have additionally shown the calculation cost and effectiveness of CS for SAR imagery using chamber room experimental data and actual Ku-band airplane SAR data. The calculation cost is more than 300 times that of original SAR imaging but we can reduce the observation data into half. The difference between complex values of original and CS-reconstructed SAR images is typically −20 dB in the case of Ku-band airplane. We have demonstrated that the CS-based SAR is a powerful tool when the loss of signal-to noise ratio due to observation loss and calculation cost are disregarded.