ISAR Imaging of Maneuvering Target Based on the L-Class of Fourth-Order Complex-Lag PWVD

In inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imaging of a maneuvering target, the received signal in a range bin can be characterized as a multicomponent polynomial phase signal (PPS) after motion compensation. The traditional discrete Fourier transform algorithm is not appropriate in analyzing the PPS. In this paper, the L-class of a fourth-order complex-lag polynomial Wigner–Ville distribution (PWVD) is presented to generate a high-resolution time–frequency distribution (TFD) for the multicomponent PPS. For a signal with polynomial phase up to order four (this is accurate enough in ISAR imaging), the cross-terms between different components can be reduced by the convolution in the frequency domain of the L-class of the fourth-order complex-lag PWVD. The new TFD is used in the ISAR imaging of the maneuvering target, and high-quality instantaneous ISAR images are obtained. Results of simulated and real data demonstrate the effectiveness of the method above.