Sparsity-based three-dimensional image reconstruction for near-field MIMO radar imaging

Near-field multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar imaging systems are of interest in diverse fields such as medicine, through-wall imaging, airport security, concealed weapon detection, and surveillance. The successful operation of these radar imaging systems highly depends on the quality of the images reconstructed from radar data. Since the underlying scenes can be typically represented sparsely in some transform domain, sparsity priors can effectively regularize the image formation problem and hence enable high-quality reconstructions. In this paper, we develop an efficient three-dimensional image reconstruction method that exploits sparsity in near-field MIMO radar imaging. Sparsity is enforced using total variation regularization, and the reflectivity distribution is reconstructed iteratively without requiring computation with huge matrices. The performance of the developed algorithm is illustrated through numerical simulations. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the sparsity-based method compared to a classical image reconstruction method in terms of image quality.