TEFISTA-Net: GTD Parameter Estimation of Low-Frequency Ultra-Wideband Radar via Model-Based Deep Learning

The geometrical theory of diffraction (GTD) has been widely investigated to describe the target scattering behaviors with the low-frequency ultra-wideband (LFW) radar. In this paper, we propose a new model-based deep learning method for GTD parameter estimation. The proposed method is designed by unfolding the fast iterative shrinkage thresholding algorithm (FISTA) into a deep neural network. Unlike existing methods based on compressed sensing (CS), the key parameters in our algorithm are fully learnable, avoiding nontrivial parameter tuning procedures. Our network with simple convolution operations is more computationally efficient than existing methods, which require matrix inversions or quadratic programming and have low convergence speed. A novel loss function is designed for the new network to improve the capacity of target enhancement. Experiments on simulation data show that the new method achieves higher computational efficiency while maintaining or improving the precision of GTD parameter estimation compared with existing methods.