Random Stepped Frequency ISAR 2D Joint Imaging and Autofocusing by Using 2D-AFCIFSBL

Abstract

With the increasingly complex electromagnetic environment faced by radar, random stepped frequency (RSF) has garnered widespread attention owing to its remarkable Electronic Counter-Countermeasure (ECCM) characteristic, and it has been universally applied in inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) in recent years. However, if the phase error induced by the translational motion of the target in RSF ISAR is not precisely compensated, the imaging result will be defocused. To address this challenge, a novel 2D method based on sparse Bayesian learning, denoted as 2D-autofocusing complex-value inverse-free SBL (2D-AFCIFSBL), is proposed to accomplish joint ISAR imaging and autofocusing for RSF ISAR. First of all, to integrate autofocusing into the ISAR imaging process, phase error estimation is incorporated into the imaging model. Then, we increase the speed of Bayesian inference by relaxing the evidence lower bound (ELBO) to avoid matrix inversion, and we further convert the iterative process into a matrix form to improve the computational efficiency. Finally, the 2D phase error is estimated through maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) in the image reconstruction iteration. Experimental results on both simulated and measured datasets have substantiated the effectiveness and computational efficiency of the proposed 2D joint imaging and autofocusing method.