Refined Interference Artifacts Mitigation for SAR Based on Robust Missing-Data Recovery

Spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems are increasingly impacted by harmful radio frequency interference. To address these challenges, many satellite data-processing pipelines incorporate interference filtering modules. However, it often causes either range sidelobe level or azimuth ghosting ambiguity artifacts due to the effects of notch filtering. In this paper, a refined interference artifacts mitigation method for SAR based on robust missing-data recovery is proposed to efficiently process and restore image details. Firstly, it identifies interference locations on a pulse-by-pulse basis. And signal recovery is performed with very few iterations by improved robust missing-data iterative adaptive approach (MIAA), which rapidly removes interference artifacts while mitigating other adverse effects caused by notch, such as high range sidelobes from notch filtering and azimuth ambiguity from undersampling. Experimental results using data from the Chinese Lutan-1 satellite demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method.