ISAR Imaging for Maneuvering Targets via Fast Rotation Parameter Estimation

Abstract

In inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imaging of maneuvering targets, traditional high-order phase compensation methods are usually limited by the heavy computational burden of parameter estimation, making it hard to apply in real-time cases. In this letter, an efficient ISAR motion compensation method is proposed based on fast parameter estimation. A novel analytic expression of the image entropy is derived with the help of a compensation matrix based on sinc function interpolation, which can eliminate the high-order phase term. Hence, the parameter estimation is transformed to an optimization problem where the gradient descent algorithm can be adopted to accelerate the computation speed. Compared with other recently proposed methods, our method is superior in high robustness and low computing cost. Experiments with simulated and real data have verified that without affecting the image quality, the computing time of our method can be reduced to about 1/4 of the traditional search algorithm.