Uniform rotational motion compensation for inverse synthetic aperture radar targets from image domain

Since high-resolution inverse synthetic radar (ISAR) images are significant in the analysis of moving targets, this paper, for the first time, proposes a novel method to compensate the uniform rotational motion by estimating the effective rotational velocity (ERV) in image domain. Specifically, we extract high-energy scatterers of sequent ISAR images by scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) in order to link them with the related ERV in the imaging panel. Then we adopt registering approach based on minimum Euclidian distance and Gaussian probabilistic density function to select scatterers with the mostly similar rotational aspect. After that, we estimate the ERV in a searching manner, and then employ it in the cancellation of quadratic-order phase items in the cross-range cells of the image. This method is validated quick and efficient by both simulated and real signal experiments.