Three-dimensional interferometric inverse synthetic aperture radar imaging with limited pulses by exploiting joint sparsity

For manoeuvring targets, long coherent processing interval observation results in a serious time-varying Doppler modulation that is difficult to achieve high quality three-dimensional (3D) interferometric inverse synthetic aperture radar (InISAR) images. In this study, a novel 3D InISAR imaging algorithm with limited pulses for manoeuvring targets is proposed. First, the authors formulate a joint sparsity-constraint optimisation to reconstruct super-resolution multi-channel inverse synthetic aperture radar images simultaneously. Then, high quality 3D images of the target can be achieved via the conventional interferometry technique. The main advantages of the proposed approach are: (i) by exploiting joint sparsity property of the InISAR multi-channel signals, it can effectively improve the recovery precision of scattering centres of the target; and (ii) it can preserve the cross-channel information, and hence, accurate interferometric phase can be obtained. Both simulated and real data experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.