In this paper, we address sparsity-based imaging of building interior structures for through-the-wall radar imaging and urban sensing applications. The proposed approach utilizes information about common building construction practices to form an appropriate sparse representation of the building layout. With a ground based SAR system, and considering that interior walls are either parallel or perpendicular to the exterior walls, the antenna at each position would receive reflections from the walls parallel to the radar's scan direction as well as from the corners between two meeting walls. We propose a two-step approach for wall detection and localization. In the first step, a dictionary of possible wall locations is used to recover the positions of both interior and exterior walls that are parallel to the scan direction. A follow-on step uses a dictionary of possible corner reflectors to locate wall-wall junctions along the detected wall segments, thereby determining the true wall extents and detecting walls perpendicular to the scan direction. The utility of the proposed approach is demonstrated using simulated data.

Date Published: 31 May 2013
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 8717, Compressive Sensing II, 87170K (31 May 2013); doi: 10.1117/12.2015410

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8717:
Compressive Sensing II
Fauzia Ahmad, Editor(s)