Low-Complexity 3D InISAR Imaging Using a Compressive Hardware Device and a Single Receiver

An Interferometric Inverse SAR system is able to perform 3D imaging of non-cooperative targets by measuring their responses over time and through several receiving antennas. Phase differences between signals acquired with a spatial diversity in vertical or horizontal directions are used to localize moving scatterers in 3D. The use of several receiving channels generally results into a costly and complex hardware solution, and this paper proposes performing this multichannel acquisition using a single receiver and a hardware compressive device, based on a chaotic cavity which simultaneously multiplexes in the spectral domain signals acquired over different antennas. The radar responses of the scene are encoded in the spectral domain onto the single output of a leaky chaotic cavity, and can be retrieved by solving an inverse problem involving the random transfer matrix of the cavity. The applicability of this compressed sensing approach for the 3D imaging of a non-cooperative target using low-complexity hardware is demonstrated using both simulations and measurements. This study opens up new perspectives to reduce the hardware complexity of high-resolution ISAR systems.