Three-dimensional ISAR image reconstruction technique based on radar network

Recently, there are few reports on three-dimensional (3D) imaging method based on radar network. Aiming at the 3D imaging problem in radar network, a reconstruction method for 3D inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) image based on radar network is proposed in this paper. The 2D ISAR image is considered as a geometric projection of a target on an imaging projection plane; thus, aerial points might be scatterers of targets if their geometric projection on an imaging projection plane is similar to the 2D ISAR image of the target. The proposed method makes use of the similarity between the ISAR Range-Doppler (RD) image and the target's geometric projection on the imaging projection plane to construct the 3D image reconstruction model. The reconstructed target 3D ISAR image is obtained by estimating the scattering centre position in 3D Cartesian space. In this paper, the projection formulas designed to calculate the geometric projection of the aerial points on the imaging projection plane are derived to first form the projection image. Depending on the similarity between the 2D ISAR image and the target's projection, the 3D ISAR image reconstruction model based on the radar network is constructed. Further, a corresponding algorithm for solving the 3D ISAR image reconstruction model is proposed. Finally, the radar distribution influence on reconstruction precision is analysed, and some experimental results are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.