Passive SAR Imaging using Phaseless Measurements

Abstract:
Passive synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is an imaging method that uses existing illuminators of opportunity rather than a dedicated transmitter. Passive radar has seen an increase in popularity due to increased stealth, decreased cost, and superior use of the electromagnetic spectrum. In this paper we present an incoherent imaging method for passive SAR that uses phaseless or magnitude only measurements. Unlike conventional methods, our approach only requires a single receiver. The method is based on the observation that the squared modulus of the data can be cast as a linear mapping of a rank-one positive semi-definite operator, formed as the tensor product of scene reflectivity with itself. Thus, we pose imaging as a convex optimization problem which utilizes the mathematical structure of the unknown. We demonstrate the performance of our approach with numerical simulations.