Ground based synthetic aperture radar (gbsar) with transmitting and receiving multiple antennas (mimo) and using the processing technique called compressive sensing (cs)

Ground based synthetic aperture radar apparatus comprising

• a transmission and reception unit,
• a number of directional transmitting antennas comprising at least three transmitting antennas operatively connected with the transmission and reception unit to transmit each one to a target arranged in the radar field of view a radar transmission signal of determined wavelength the transmitting antennas being arranged one after the other along a first linear guide with irregular spacings of amplitude equal to different multiples of a pitch,
• a number of directional receiving antennas operatively connected with the transmission and reception unit to receive each one a number of wavelength reception signals of said determined wavelength from the target and corresponding to said transmission signals transmitted by said transmitting antennas,
• said receiving antennas being arranged one after the other along at least a second linear guide parallel at a given distance with respect to said first guide, with successive irregular spacings of amplitude equal to different multiples of said pitch;
• an electronic acquisition and processing unit operatively connected to said transmission and reception unit to:
• acquiring said reception signals,
• associating said reception signals with a virtual acquisition point arranged in a median position between the center of the transmitting antenna and the center of the receiving antenna,
• constructing an array of elements based on the position of the virtual acquisition point points the array having a number of columns and a number of rows,
• wherein in said construction step of the array all the elements of all the columns of order not corresponding to the position on the median line of an acquisition virtual point are set equal to zero and the other elements of the array are filled with random numbers;
• processing said elements of the array by means of a compressive sensing algorithm applied to the array to reconstruct the values of the electric field acquired from a virtual array consisting of all the points along the line,
• processing said electric field values by means of Synthetic Aperture techniques to obtain at least one radar image of said target corresponding to the acquisition of said reception signals.