A Fast Bistatic ISAR Imaging Approach for Rapidly Spinning Targets via Exploiting SAR Technique

Abstract

Because of the large range of cell migration (RCM) and nonstationary Doppler frequency modulation (DFM) produced by non-cooperative targets with rapid spinning motions, it is difficult to efficiently generate a well-focused bistatic inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) by use of the conventional imaging algorithms. Utilizing the property of the inherent azimuth spatial invariance in strip-map synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging mode, in this work, an efficient bistatic ISAR imaging approach based on circular shift operation in the range-Doppler (RD) domain is proposed. First, echoes of rapidly spinning targets are transformed into the RD domain, whose exact analytical is derived on the basis of the principle of stationary phase (POSP). Second, the RCM is corrected by using an efficient circular shift operation in the RD domain. By doing so, the energies of a scatterer that span multiple range cells are concentrated into the same range cell, and the time-varying DFM can also be compensated along the rotating radius direction. Compared with existing methods, the proposed method has advantages in its computational complexity, avoiding the interpolation and multi-dimensional search operation, and in its satisfactory imaging performance under low signal to noise ratio (SNR) conditions thanks to the two-dimensional coherent integration gain utilized. Finally, several numerical simulations are conducted to show the validity of the proposed algorithm.