Defocusing and distortion elimination for shipborne bistatic ISAR

Shipborne bistatic inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR), with a stationary and visible transmitter on land and a mobile and stealthy receiver on a ship with complex 3-D rotations is a strategic asset which can provide complementary information to monostatic ISAR. However, it must first overcome the serious problems of defocusing and distortion due to the time-varying bistatic angle. In this letter, an improved cubic chirplet decomposition method is proposed to solve the defocusing problem. By decomposing the ISAR echo into cubic chirplet atoms and estimating the parameters for each term, higher-order defocusing terms can be eliminated. Moreover, a novel method based on linked scatterers is put forward to solve the distortion problem. The method utilizes linked scatterers from monostatic ISAR image to calculate and compensate the distortion angle. The effectiveness of the proposed methods is verified by the simulation results.