ISAR imaging of manoeuvring targets with the range instantaneous chirp rate technique

The conventional range instantaneous Doppler (RID) algorithm is a well accepted inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imaging method for manoeuvring targets. In the RID imaging, the cross-range resolution depends on the instantaneous Doppler of scatterers at the imaging instant. For a high manoeuvring target, the instantaneous Doppler of scatterers may be small at some imaging instants and the satisfactory RID images may not be obtained. On the other hand, a large instantaneous chirp rate is often present for the same scatterer at the same instant for RID imaging. In order to obtain some additional information of a manoeuvring target, a novel ISAR imaging approach, referred to as the range instantaneous chirp (RIC), is proposed based on instantaneous chirp rate of scatterer to provide cross-range resolution. Using the proposed imaging algorithm, with the same received data of RID, a RIC image is generated at the same instant with a different `view`. Therefore the RIC image may provide some additional information that is not shown in the RID image. With both the RIC and RID images, a better target recognition and identification can be achieved for high-manoeuvring targets. The proposed RIC algorithm is verified by raw radar data.