An Efficient ISAR Imaging Method for Maneuvering Target Based on Synchrosqueezing Transform

For inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imaging of a target with complex motions, the received signal in a range bin can be characterized by a multicomponent polynomial phase signal (PPS) after motion compensation. Due to this reason, Fourier transform (FT)-based conventional range-Doppler (RD) ISAR imaging algorithm cannot handle this model well, and the radar image obtained will be blurred. The synchrosqueezing transform (SST), which combines the continuous wavelet transform and frequency reassignment, is a promising tool to analyze the multicomponent PPS signal since it provides high-resolution time-frequency distribution (TFD) for the multicomponent PPS, but no cross-terms. In this letter, we introduce the SST into ISAR imaging of a maneuvering target and show its potential to offer promising new possibilities for enhanced ISAR image interpretation in terms of further target recognition. Real data results and computational complexity analysis demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method.