Non-Local Compressive Sensing Based SAR Tomography

Tomographic SAR (TomoSAR) inversion of urban areas is an inherently sparse reconstruction problem and, hence, can be solved using compressive sensing (CS) algorithms. This paper proposes solutions for two notorious problems in this field: 1) TomoSAR requires a high number of data sets, which makes the technique expensive. However, it can be shown that the number of acquisitions and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) can be traded off against each other, because it is asymptotically only the product of the number of acquisitions and SNR that determines the reconstruction quality. We propose to increase SNR by integrating non-local estimation into the inversion and show that a reasonable reconstruction of buildings from only seven interferograms is feasible. 2) CS-based inversion is computationally expensive and therefore barely suitable for large-scale applications. We introduce a new fast and accurate algorithm for solving the non-local L1-L2-minimization problem, central to CS-based reconstruction algorithms. The applicability of the algorithm is demonstrated using simulated data and TerraSAR-X high-resolution spotlight images over an area in Munich, Germany.Comment: 10 page

Soft Consistency Reconstruction: A Robust 1-bit Compressive Sensing Algorithm

A class of recovering algorithms for 1-bit compressive sensing (CS) named Soft Consistency Reconstructions (SCRs) are proposed. Recognizing that CS recovery is essentially an optimization problem, we endeavor to improve the characteristics of the objective function under noisy environments. With a family of re-designed consistency criteria, SCRs achieve remarkable counter-noise performance gain over the existing counterparts, thus acquiring the desired robustness in many real-world applications. The benefits of soft decisions are exemplified through structural analysis of the objective function, with intuition described for better understanding. As expected, through comparisons with existing methods in simulations, SCRs demonstrate preferable robustness against noise in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime, while maintaining comparable performance in high SNR regime

Multiple and single snapshot compressive beamforming

For a sound field observed on a sensor array, compressive sensing (CS) reconstructs the direction-of-arrival (DOA) of multiple sources using a sparsity constraint. The DOA estimation is posed as an underdetermined problem by expressing the acoustic pressure at each sensor as a phase-lagged superposition of source amplitudes at all hypothetical DOAs. Regularizing with an $\ell_1$-norm constraint renders the problem solvable with convex optimization, and promoting sparsity gives high-resolution DOA maps. Here, the sparse source distribution is derived using maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimates for both single and multiple snapshots. CS does not require inversion of the data covariance matrix and thus works well even for a single snapshot where it gives higher resolution than conventional beamforming. For multiple snapshots, CS outperforms conventional high-resolution methods, even with coherent arrivals and at low signal-to-noise ratio. The superior resolution of CS is demonstrated with vertical array data from the SWellEx96 experiment for coherent multi-paths.Comment: In press Journal of Acoustical Society of Americ

Frequency-modulated continuous-wave LiDAR compressive depth-mapping

We present an inexpensive architecture for converting a frequency-modulated continuous-wave LiDAR system into a compressive-sensing based depth-mapping camera. Instead of raster scanning to obtain depth-maps, compressive sensing is used to significantly reduce the number of measurements. Ideally, our approach requires two difference detectors. % but can operate with only one at the cost of doubling the number of measurments. Due to the large flux entering the detectors, the signal amplification from heterodyne detection, and the effects of background subtraction from compressive sensing, the system can obtain higher signal-to-noise ratios over detector-array based schemes while scanning a scene faster than is possible through raster-scanning. %Moreover, we show how a single total-variation minimization and two fast least-squares minimizations, instead of a single complex nonlinear minimization, can efficiently recover high-resolution depth-maps with minimal computational overhead. Moreover, by efficiently storing only $2m$ data points from $m<n$ measurements of an $n$ pixel scene, we can easily extract depths by solving only two linear equations with efficient convex-optimization methods

Phase Retrieval From Binary Measurements

We consider the problem of signal reconstruction from quadratic measurements that are encoded as +1 or -1 depending on whether they exceed a predetermined positive threshold or not. Binary measurements are fast to acquire and inexpensive in terms of hardware. We formulate the problem of signal reconstruction using a consistency criterion, wherein one seeks to find a signal that is in agreement with the measurements. To enforce consistency, we construct a convex cost using a one-sided quadratic penalty and minimize it using an iterative accelerated projected gradient-descent (APGD) technique. The PGD scheme reduces the cost function in each iteration, whereas incorporating momentum into PGD, notwithstanding the lack of such a descent property, exhibits faster convergence than PGD empirically. We refer to the resulting algorithm as binary phase retrieval (BPR). Considering additive white noise contamination prior to quantization, we also derive the Cramer-Rao Bound (CRB) for the binary encoding model. Experimental results demonstrate that the BPR algorithm yields a signal-to- reconstruction error ratio (SRER) of approximately 25 dB in the absence of noise. In the presence of noise prior to quantization, the SRER is within 2 to 3 dB of the CRB