Airborne high-resolution ISAR imaging of ship targets at sea

We address the problem of airborne high resolution two-dimensional inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) side-view imaging of ship targets. Using a simple model of the ship motions avoids the use of advanced joint-time frequency (JTF) transforms. A robust processing scheme including motion estimation and correction, optimal processing time and duration estimation and target shape extraction are developed. We stress the fact that the robustness of this processing leads to a single ISAR image analysis and that no merging of data from a set of radar images is necessary.