A novel block compressive sensing algorithm for SAR image formation.

• Compressive sensing for SAR image formation. • Block compressive sensing (BCS) for SAR imaging. • Performance evaluation of CS-SAR algorithms by real SAR data. • A novel block compressive sensing algorithm. Compressive Sensing (CS) theory has been used for Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imaging due to the sparsity feature of SAR images. Therefore, some well-known CS algorithms like Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP) and Regularized OMP (ROMP) methods have been employed for SAR image formation with a very small number of samples. On the other hand, it has been shown that the SAR signal is consistent with the definition of block sparsity. Hence, compressive sensing methods employing block structure, known as Block Compressive Sensing (BCS), are presented and used for SAR image formation to achieve more accuracy with a smaller number of samples. In this paper, first, a new BCS-based algorithm, namely, Block Norm Regularized Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (BNROMP), is introduced which can be used in all BCS applications. Then, this novel method is used for SAR image formation to achieve more accuracy and excellent resolution with a small number of samples. The simulation results for the synthesized data, as well as real data, show that by using the novel BNROMP method, we could form SAR images with higher quality, as compared to those for the standard image formation algorithms and other CS-SAR or BCS-SAR methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]