Wide-angle ISAR passive imaging using smoothed pseudo Wigner-Ville distribution

We are investigating passive radar imaging of aircraft using reflected TV signals. UHF-band ISAR imaging requires wide-angle data to produce good cross-range resolution. We show that direct Fourier reconstruction (DFR) causes degradation of the reconstructed image due to aspect-dependent scattering. We find that a smoothed pseudo Wigner-Ville distribution (SPWVD) applied in the cross-range direction in place of the Fourier transform can generate a sequence of images, which shows the target reflectivity as a function of aspect angle. Compared to DFR results, these images have higher cross-range resolution. A final image can be synthesized from these images and used for target recognition. XPATCH is used to simulate monostatic data from an aircraft. The proposed SPWVD-based imaging method produces a useful image of the aircraft from this data.