Three-dimensional interferometric inverse synthetic aperture radar imaging of ship target based on cubic phase signal model

Abstract

The interferometric inverse synthetic aperture radar (InISAR) system realises the interferometric processing on the imaging results obtained from three radars on a set of orthogonal baselines and can get the three-dimensional (3D) imaging for the ship target. The ship targets experience complex motion characteristics such as roll, pitch and yaw in the course of navigation. These motions lead to the blurred two-dimensional (2D) images and further affect the interference performance during the InISAR procedure. Therefore, this paper proposes a 3D InISAR imaging algorithm for the ship targets based on the cubic phase signal (CPS) model. This method approximates the azimuth echo signal as a CPS and utilises the particle swarm optimization algorithm to estimate the higher-order phase coefficients. While preserving the phase information, the 3D image result can be achieved by the interference processing between the high-resolution 2D images. The effectiveness of the algorithm is validated through the simulation experiments under different baseline lengths and signal-to-noise ratios.