Review on interferometric ISAR 3D imaging: Concept, technology and experiment

Abstract

Abstract This paper presents an overview of Interferometric inverse synthetic aperture radar (InISAR) three-dimensional (3D) imaging according to the presented research chain. InISAR applies interferometric technology of multi antenna to inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR). It can realize 3D imaging of long distance non-cooperative targets, under all weather conditions. Hence it has wide range of applications, especially in military and civilian applications. In InISAR imaging, interferometric processing is applied to the two obtained ISAR images of each baseline, achieving the projection coordinates of the scattering centers along the baseline direction, which are denoted as x and y coordinates in this paper. Then, the 3D imaging result is established combined with the radial information, which is denoted as z coordinate in this paper. The InISAR 3D image is directly consistent with the physical size of the target. It can reflect the constant feature that is not affected by the target motion characteristics, effectively improving the target recognition ability. On the basis of the basic principle of InlSAR 3D imaging, this paper reviews and summarizes the development and research status of InISAR 3D imaging, focuses on the technical difficulties and main solutions, and points out the direction of further research in view of the existing problems.