A New 3-D Geometry Reconstruction Method of Space Target Utilizing the Scatterer Energy Accumulation of ISAR Image Sequence

Abstract

By analyzing the motion characteristics and the radar observation model of triaxial stabilized space targets, a new 3-D geometry reconstruction method is proposed based on the energy accumulation of inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) image sequence. According to the radar line of sight (LOS), we first construct the projection vectors of the 3-D geometry of a space target on the imaging planes. Then, by projecting the 3-D scatterer candidates on each imaging plane, we can accumulate the scattering energy of the corresponding 2-D projection position in each image. The 3-D scatterer candidates occupying the larger accumulated energy will be reserved as the real scatterers. To improve the efficiency, the real 3-D scatterers will be searched by using the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm one by one. Compared with traditional 3-D geometry reconstruction methods, the proposed one never needs the 2-D scatterer extraction and trajectory association, which remains the challenges in ISAR image processing. Experimental results based on the simulated point target and electromagnetic data are presented to validate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method.