Three‐dimensional point cloud reconstruction of inverse synthetic aperture radar image sequences based on back projection and iterative closest point fusion

Abstract In order to recover the three‐dimensional (3D) structure of the target from sequential inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) images, the factorisation method is generally used. It requires a large number of high‐quality matched feature points from different ISAR images. If the number of extracted feature points is insufficient, the restored 3D structure is not obvious. Furthermore, the mismatching of feature points will greatly affect the quality of target reconstruction. However, the factorisation method only uses the information from the ISAR images, while that from imaging geometry is not sufficiently considered. ISAR imaging is a kind of projection, and the projection plane information could be taken into account for the 3D reconstruction. Hence, a new 3D reconstruction method for stable targets from sequential ISAR images is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the ISAR images are preprocessed with the CLEAN algorithm. The maximum between‐cluster variance method is applied to extract feature points from the processed images. Moreover, the image projection plane and projection equation corresponding to different ISAR images are analysed by using imaging geometry information. According to the projection equation, the feature points are back‐projected (BP) to the 3D space. Finally, the 3D point clouds obtained by the BP from multiple radar images are fused by the iterative closest point algorithm to restore the 3D structure of the target. The simulation and experiment results show the effectiveness and robustness of this method.