Arbitrary Array Distributed ISAR Three-Dimensional Imaging of Ship Targets

In the distributed radar systems, the high array alignment accuracy is often required to enable the coherent processing, however achieving this is challenging to achieve in practical applications. This study proposes a three-dimensional (3-D) radar imaging method for ships based on an arbitrary array configuration within a distributed interferometric inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) system. And each base station consists of an interferometric with three orthogonal channels. Firstly, the separated base stations observe the ship target from arbitrary angles to acquire the echoes of the target from different observation angles. Each station then reconstructs a three-dimensional image of the target through the optimal time selection method and the interferometric technique. These 3-D images, presented as point clouds, contain complementary information due to different observation angles. Finally, a 3-D image fusion technique is applied to obtain the final three-dimensional image. The effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method have been validated through simulation experiments.