High resolution inverse synthetic aperture radar imaging of three-axis-stabilized space target by exploiting orbital and sparse priors

The development of inverse synthetic aperture radar （ISAR） imaging techniques is of notable significance for moni- toring, tracking and identifying space targets in orbit. Usually, a well-focused ISAR image of a space target can be obtained in a deliberately selected imaging segment in which the target moves with only uniform planar rotation. However, in some imaging segments, the nonlinear range migration through resolution cells （MTRCs） and time-varying Doppler caused by the three-dimensional rotation of the target would degrade the ISAR imaging performance, and it is troublesome to realize accurate motion compensation with conventional methods. Especially in the case of low signal-to-noise ratio （SNR）, the estimation of motion parameters is more difficult. In this paper, a novel algorithm for high-resolution ISAR imaging of a space target by using its precise ephemeris and orbital motion model is proposed. The innovative contributions are as follows. 1） The change of a scatterer projection position is described with the spatial-variant angles of imaging plane calculated based on the orbital motion model of the three-axis-stabilized space target. 2） A correction method of MTRC in slant- and cross-range dimensions for arbitrarily imaging segment is proposed. 3） Coarse compensation for translational motion using the precise ephemeris and the fine compensation for residual phase errors by using sparsity-driven autofo- cus method are introduced to achieve a high-resolution ISAR image. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method.