Multiview Three-Dimensional Interferometric Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar

Three-dimensional (3D) inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imaging has been proven feasible by combining traditional ISAR imaging and interferometry. Such technique, namely Inteferometric ISAR (InISAR), allows for the main target scattering centers to be mapped into a 3-D spatial domain, therefore forming 3-D images under the form of 3-D point clouds. 3-D InISAR overcomes some main limitations of traditional 2-D ISAR imaging, such as the problem of cross-range scaling and unknown image projection plane. Despite the great advantage of 3-D imaging over traditional 2-D imaging, some issues remain, such as scatterer scintillation, shadowing effects, poor SNR, etc., which limit the effectiveness of 3-D imaging. A solution to these issues can be found in the use of multiple 3-D views, which can be obtained exploiting either multitemporal or multiperspective configurations or a combination of both. This paper proposes this concept and develops the image fusion algorithms that are necessary to produce multiview 3-D ISAR images. The effectiveness of the proposed technique is tested by using real data collected with a multistatic InISAR system.