Target-Oriented High-Resolution SAR Image Formation via Semantic Information Guided Regularizations

Sparsity-regularized synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging framework has shown its remarkable performance to generate a feature-enhanced high-resolution image, in which a sparsity-inducing regularizer is involved by exploiting the sparsity priors of some visual features in the underlying image. However, since the simple prior of low-level features is insufficient to describe different semantic contents in the image, this type of regularizer will be incapable of distinguishing between the target of interest and unconcerned background clutters. As a consequence, the features belonging to the target and clutters are simultaneously affected in the generated image without concerning their underlying semantic labels. To address this problem, we propose a novel semantic information guided generative framework for target-oriented SAR image formation, which aims at enhancing the interested target scatters while suppressing the background clutters. First, we develop a new semantics-specific regularizer for image formation by exploiting the statistical properties of different semantic categories in a target scene SAR image. In order to infer the semantic label for each pixel in an unsupervised way, we moreover induce a novel high-level prior-driven regularizer and some semantic causal rules from the prior knowledge. Finally, our regularized framework for image formation is further derived as a simple iteratively reweighted l(1) minimization problem that can be conveniently solved by many off-the-shelf solvers. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our framework for SAR image formation in terms of target enhancement and clutters suppression, compared with the state of the arts. Additionally, the proposed framework opens a new direction of devoting some machine learning strategies to image formation, which can benefit the subsequent decision-making tasks.