Micro-Doppler Signature Extraction and ISAR Imaging for Target With Micromotion Dynamics

The micromotion of a target will generate a micro-Doppler (m-D) effect in the frequency domain. The m-D effect is regarded as a unique property of the target, which has special significance in target detection, identification, and classification. The classical range-Doppler algorithm cannot obtain a clear inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) image due to the m-D effect induced by micromotion dynamics. The m-D effect induced by periodical micromotion is represented as a sinusoidal modulation in a spectrogram, whereas the Doppler induced by a main body is depicted as the form of a straight line. Therefore, the extraction of an m-D signature is transformed into the separation of a sinusoid and a straight line. The cancellation technique is a classical method for removing ground clutter. Based on the same principle, the cancellation technique is applied to the spectrogram in this letter, which successfully achieves the separation of the m-D signature and gets the clearer ISAR image of the main body. The effectiveness and robustness of the algorithm are proved by simulation results.