Evaluating compressive sensing algorithms in through-the-wall radar via F1-score

To achieve high resolution through-the-wall radar imaging (TWRI), long wideband antenna arrays need to be considered, thus resulting in massive amounts of data. Compressive sensing (CS) techniques resolve this issue by allowing image reconstruction using much fewer measurements. The performance of different CS algorithms, when applied to TWRI, has not been investigated in a comprehensive and comparative manner. In this paper, popular CS algorithms are evaluated, to see which are most suitable for TWRI applications. As for the evaluation criteria, the notion of F₁-score is adopted and used in the context of TWRI; thus emphasising the algorithms ability to reconstruct an image with correctly detected targets. Algorithms responses to different levels of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and compression rate are evaluated. Numerical results show that for systems with low SNR, alternating direction based algorithms work better than others. When the SNR is high, algorithms depending on spectral gradient-projection methods give good results even with high compression rates.