Joint use of two-dimensional tomography and ISAR imaging for three-dimensional image formation of non-cooperative targets

Abstract

A tomographic approach is proposed in this paper to form three-dimensional Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar (ISAR) images of non-cooperative moving targets. A 2D ISAR image is generated for each transmit/receive element of two orthogonal arrays. The inter-element phase differences are coherently combined using beamforming techniques to estimate the effective rotation vector modulus, the image projection plane orientation angle and finally the height of each target's scatterer. A theoretical formulation is firstly provided and simulation results are then shown to confirm the theory.