Acceleration of monostatic shooting and bouncing ray method for inverse synthetic aperture radar image generation

The enhanced shooting and bouncing ray (SBR) technique based on the bistatic approximation, which is called the one-shot inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) technique, has been devised to accelerate the conventional monostatic SBR (CM-SBR) technique, which is suitable for inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imaging. However, because of the bistatic approximation, this method results in the distortion of ISAR images. Therefore, to obtain an accurate image, radar returns should be obtained from the monostatic configuration. This paper describes a new method, the ray-travel map (RTM), which accelerates the CM-SBR technique while simultaneously considering both the CM-SBR and the ISAR configuration. Then, we demonstrate that the proposed method can significantly enhance the speed of CM-SBR, while providing accurate distortion-free ISAR image. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 58:1848–1855, 2016