Cross range streaks in ISAR images generated via the shooting-and-bouncing ray technique: cause and solutions

The low-level "cross-range streaks," observed in the ISAR images generated by the shooting-and-bouncing ray technique, are investigated. The streaks arise due to angular-scintillation noise in the Xpatch data, and such scintillation occurs due to the finite discretization of the ray-shooting grid. We propose two solutions to solve the streaking problem. The first solution uses spatial averaging to filter out the angular-scintillation noise. The second solution uses the multi-angle signature-extrapolation algorithm to generate the frequency-aspect scattered-field data. The performance and computational efficiency of these solutions are analyzed and presented.