A novel image registration method for InISAR 3D imaging

Abstract

Image registration is a key intermediate step for Interferometric Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar (InISAR) three-dimensional (3D) imaging. It arranges the same scatterers of the target on the same pixel cell in different ISAR images, which makes the interferometric processing carried on between the same scatterers to obtain its 3D coordinates. This paper proposes a novel ISAR image registration method of three steps. Firstly, chirp Fourier transform is used to estimate the rotational angular velocity of the target. Secondly, the compensation phase is constructed, according to the rotational angular velocity, to eliminate the wave path difference between different radars echoes. Finally, two-dimensional (2D) Fourier transform is used to yield registered ISAR images. The proposed method achieves the ISAR image registration through phase compensation in echo field, therefore, no extra computation is needed in image field. The experiment results demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method in precision, computation efficiency and practicability.