Separation of target rigid body and micro-doppler effects in ISAR imaging

Micro-Doppler (m-D) effect is caused by moving parts of the radar target. It can cover rigid parts of a target and degrade the inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) image. Separation of the patterns caused by stationary parts of the target from those caused by moving (rotating or vibrating) parts is the topic of this paper. Two techniques for separation of the rigid part from the rotating parts have been proposed. The first technique is based on time-frequency (TF) representation with sliding window and order statistics techniques. The first step in this technique is recognition of rigid parts in the range/cross-range plane. In the second step, reviewed TF representation and order statistics setup are employed to obtain signals caused by moving parts. The second technique can be applied in the case of very emphatic m-D effect. In the first step the rotating parts are recognized, based on the inverse Radon transform (RT). After masking these patterns, a radar image with the rigid body reflection can be obtained. The proposed methods are illustrated by examples