Three-dimensional aircraft isar imaging based on shipborne radar

A three-dimensional inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) image can provide the target’s information in range, cross-range, and height directions. Because the existing three-dimensional ISAR imaging methods require changing the observing angle, they are highly dependent on radar hardware complexity or target maneuvering movement. In this paper, a new three-dimensional ISAR imaging method based on shipborne radar is proposed. Instead of utilizing multiple radar receivers or uncontrollable target movement, we take advantage of the ship’s known yaw, pitch, and roll rotations, and obtain different observing angles using a single receiver fixed on the ship. To extract the scatterers, a new algorithm called REACT that combines RELAX and adaptive chirplet transform is presented. Subsequently, the errors of the three-dimensional imaging method are analyzed by partial derivative deduction and Monte Carlo simulation. On the basis of the error analysis, a novel best imaging time selecting method based on image quality function that considers both accuracy and resolution is also put forward. Simulation results validate our theoretical analysis and show the effectiveness of our method.