Enhancing Scattering Center Visibility for ISAR-Based Ballistic Missile Identification

The immense threat posed by ballistic missiles has prompted many nations to develop ballistic missile defense systems. To operate these defense systems effectively, it is essential to quickly identify the missile type in flight and prioritize responses accordingly. Given that ballistic missiles follow a consistent elliptical trajectory, it is reasonable to employ inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) for missile identification. However, due to minimal external differences between various types of ballistic missiles, conventional ISAR methods have limitations in distinguishing between them. This paper proposes a method that converts scattered wave data collected at different observation angles into range profiles to directly estimate scattering centers. The position data of these scattering centers are transformed into the frequency domain to generate ISAR images. Additionally, by merging traditional ISAR images with those incorporating scattering center positions, this method demonstrates the possibility of achieving enhanced ISAR image visibility.