ISAR Imaging of Nonuniformly Rotating Targets With Low SNR Based on Coherently Integrated Nonuniform Trilinear Autocorrelation Function

In this letter, considering the inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imaging of nonuniformly rotating targets under a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) environment, an effective ISAR imaging algorithm based on the coherently integrated nonuniform trilinear autocorrelation function (CINTAF) is proposed. Because the definition of a nonuniform trilinear autocorrelation function (NTAF) which enables a coherent accumulation of the signal energy in both the time and lag-time domains, the proposed method has a significant antinoise performance improvement in comparison with other algorithms, while the computational complexity remains similar. The effectiveness and superiority of this new method have been demonstrated through several simulation results.