Two-dimimensional MIMO-ISAR imaging based on space-time processing

Combining multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) radar and inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) technique can greatly reduce the number of required antennas compared with imaging only by a MIMO radar. In existing MIMO-ISAR imaging approaches, the echoes acquired from different sensors are rearranged into an equivalent single-channel ISAR signal, which is computational costly. In this paper, a new method without echo rearrangement is proposed for two-dimensional (2-D) MIMO-ISAR imaging. Firstly, the distribution of the target´s space-time spectrum is determined by 2-D ESPRIT algorithm and random Hough transform (RHT). Then, the space-time processing technique is used to overcome the spatial aliasing effect caused by the spare MIMO array. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.