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SAR Imaging Technologies and Applications

A special issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220). This special issue belongs to the section "Remote Sensors".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 25 January 2026 | Viewed by 351

Special Issue Editor

Key Laboratory of Radar Imaging and Microwave Photonics, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing 211106, China
Interests: radar image processing; target recognition; deep learning
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has long been an intensely researched topic due to its all-day all-weather remote sensing capabilities. The amount of information carried in satellite-born SAR data has expanded dramatically thanks to the rapid development of PolSAR and InSAR technologies. Meanwhile, drone-borne miniSAR systems, which are more advantageous in manufacturing costs, ground resolution, timeliness, and maneuverability, have also entered a golden era.

This Special Issue aims to publish the latest research advances in 1) SAR/ISAR system design and imaging techniques; 2) video SAR; 3) bistatic/multistatic SAR techniques, which outperform their monostatic counterparts in low probability of interception (LPI), anti-stealth, flexibility, coverage rate, and target feature extraction; and 4) scene classification, segmentation, and automatic target recognition (ATR), which include cross-modality scene/target classification network design based on aligned optical/infrared-SAR data, as well as benchmark real-synthetic SAR dataset construction to support context-drive ATR in diverse locations (such as airports, harbors, urban scenarios) and the development of continuous-learning/prototype-learning/incremental learning algorithms with the goal of learning new target categories from the samples collected from the deployment environment.

Articles may address, but are not limited to, one of the following topics:

  • SAR/ISAR imaging;
  • PolSAR/InSAR;
  • UAV-borne miniSAR systems;
  • Video SAR;
  • Bistatic/multistatic SAR;
  • Automatic target recognition (ATR) with aligned optical/infrared and SAR data;
  • Benchmark real-synthetic SAR dataset construction for scene understanding;
  • Target component analysis for explainable SAR ATR;
  • Fine-tuning SAR ATR network in continuous learning scenarios.

Dr. Zhe Geng
Guest Editor

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Keywords

  • synthetic aperture radar
  • PolSAR
  • InSAR
  • video SAR
  • bistatic/multistatic SAR
  • SAR image segmentation
  • SAR automatic target detection
  • SAR automatic target recognition
  • explainable deep neural network
  • incremental learning

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

17 pages, 8674 KiB  
Article
Spaceborne Sparse SAR Imaging Mode Design: From Theory to Implementation
by Yufan Song, Hui Bi, Fuxuan Cai, Guoxu Li, Jingjing Zhang and Wen Hong
Sensors 2025, 25(13), 3888; https://doi.org/10.3390/s25133888 - 22 Jun 2025
Viewed by 209
Abstract
To satisfy the requirement of the modern spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system, SAR imaging mode design makes a trade-off between resolution and swath coverage by controlling radar antenna sweeping. Existing spaceborne SAR systems can perform earth observation missions well in various modes, [...] Read more.
To satisfy the requirement of the modern spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system, SAR imaging mode design makes a trade-off between resolution and swath coverage by controlling radar antenna sweeping. Existing spaceborne SAR systems can perform earth observation missions well in various modes, but they still face challenges in data acquisition, storage, and transmission, especially for high-resolution wide-swath imaging. In the past few years, sparse signal processing technology has been introduced into SAR to try to solve these problems. In addition, sparse SAR imaging shows huge potential to improve system performance, such as offering wider swath coverage and higher recovered image quality. In this paper, the design scheme of spaceborne sparse SAR imaging modes is systematically introduced. In the mode design, we first design the beam positions of the sparse mode based on the corresponding traditional mode. Then, the essential parameters are calculated for system performance analysis based on radar equations. Finally, a sparse SAR imaging method based on mixed-norm regularization is introduced to obtain a high-quality image of the considered scene from the data collected by the designed sparse modes. Compared with the traditional mode, the designed sparse mode only requires us to obtain a wider swath coverage by reducing the pulse repetition rate (PRF), without changing the existing on-board system hardware. At the same time, the reduction in PRF can significantly reduce the system data rate. The problem of the azimuth ambiguity signal ratio (AASR) increasing from antenna beam scanning can be effectively solved by using the mixed-norm regularization-based sparse SAR imaging method. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue SAR Imaging Technologies and Applications)
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