Angular Super-resolution Imaging of Airborne Radar by Detect-reconstruct Approach

Angular resolution of airborne radar is usually poor because of its limited aperture size. The adjacent formation targets are difficult to be distinguished. To distinguish the adjacent targets by airborne radar, in this paper, a detect-reconstruct approach is proposed. First, the L1 norm is adopted to sparsely restrict the aerial targets. Second, because the targets are sparsely dispersed in the range dimension, a range pre-detection step is proposed to reduce the echo dimension, and the analyzed target range bins are reduced. Finally, a detect-reconstruct approach is proposed in the azimuthal super-resolution procedure to avoid the artificial targets. In simulation experiments, the angular resolution and efficiency of the proposed approach are demonstrated.