System and method for denoising synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images via sparse and low-rank (SLR) decomposition and using SAR images to image a complex scene

A computer implemented method using one or more processors for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging, the method comprising acts of:

• capturing a set of images with a SAR from different azimuth angles;
• generating a set of reconstructed SAR images by reconstructing the set of images, wherein at least some of the reconstructed SAR images have noise and contain glint;
• stacking the reconstructed SAR images into a matrix D, in which each column of the matrix is a reconstructed SAR image;
• and
• generating a denoised SAR image by decomposing matrix D to extract a clean background from the reconstructed SAR images and separate the noise and glint from the reconstructed SAR images as sparse part S, the clean background being the denoised SAR image.

A computer program product for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging, the computer program product comprising:

• a non-transitory computer-readable medium having executable instructions encoded thereon, such that upon execution of the instructions by one or more processors, the one or more processors perform operations of:
• capturing a set of images with a SAR from different azimuth angles;
• generating a set of reconstructed SAR images by reconstructing the set of images, wherein at least some of the reconstructed SAR images have noise and contain glint;
• stacking the reconstructed SAR images into a matrix D, in which each column of the matrix is a reconstructed SAR image;
• and
• generating a denoised SAR image by decomposing matrix D to extract a clean background from the reconstructed SAR images and separate the noise and glint from the reconstructed SAR images as sparse part S, the clean background being the denoised SAR image.