Three-Dimensional ISAR Imaging Using a Two-Dimensional Sparse Antenna Array

Conventional antenna array 3-D inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imaging method does imaging by first carrying out ISAR imaging for all the different antennas and then using array direction of arrival (DOA) estimation on every scatterer to get the position of that scatterer. The aperture formed by the target´s motion is used to separate the scatterers, and the antenna array aperture is used for position measurement. In this letter, a 3-D imaging method based on a combination of sparse array beamforming and ISAR imaging is proposed, where 3-D images are formed by space-time match filtering. The estimation of the target´s rotation parameters is also given. Simulation results have shown the effectiveness of the proposed methods.