High-resolution Side-view and Top-view Imaging Method of Ship Targets Using Multistatic ISAR

How to obtain high-resolution images of ship targets is an active research area in radar field due to the complexity of the ship motion. At the same time, multi-platform based surveillance and combat mode is gaining more and more interests in recent years. Based on the above situation, in this paper, a multistatic Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar (ISAR) ship imaging method is presented, the method is capable of increasing the integration time for stationary imaging by deploying the multiple platforms with appropriate altitudes and aspect angles and coherently integrating the echoes received by each platform. Combined with the optimal imaging time selection scheme, this method can obtain side-view or top-view ship images with higher-resolution as compared to the monostatic radar. Simulations are performed to verify the effectiveness of our multistatic ISAR ship imaging method.