ATASI-Net: An Efficient Sparse Reconstruction Network for Tomographic SAR Imaging with Adaptive Threshold

Tomographic SAR technique has attracted remarkable interest for its ability of three-dimensional resolving along the elevation direction via a stack of SAR images collected from different cross-track angles. The emerged compressed sensing (CS)-based algorithms have been introduced into TomoSAR considering its super-resolution ability with limited samples. However, the conventional CS-based methods suffer from several drawbacks, including weak noise resistance, high computational complexity, and complex parameter fine-tuning. Aiming at efficient TomoSAR imaging, this paper proposes a novel efficient sparse unfolding network based on the analytic learned iterative shrinkage thresholding algorithm (ALISTA) architecture with adaptive threshold, named Adaptive Threshold ALISTA-based Sparse Imaging Network (ATASI-Net). The weight matrix in each layer of ATASI-Net is pre-computed as the solution of an off-line optimization problem, leaving only two scalar parameters to be learned from data, which significantly simplifies the training stage. In addition, adaptive threshold is introduced for each azimuth-range pixel, enabling the threshold shrinkage to be not only layer-varied but also element-wise. Moreover, the final learned thresholds can be visualized and combined with the SAR image semantics for mutual feedback. Finally, extensive experiments on simulated and real data are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method.