Inverse synthetic aperture radar imaging of ship targets with complex motion based on match fourier transform for cubic chirps model

The authors address the problem of high-resolution inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imaging of ship targets with complex motion, and the cubic chirps model of ship motions is established to avoid the image deterioration for the traditional range-Doppler algorithm. A novel ISAR imaging scheme based on the extension form of match Fourier transform (EMFT) is proposed, which estimates the parameters of multi-component cubic chirps via two-dimensional maximisations and Fourier transform. The corresponding asymptotic statistical performance for the EMFT is analysed, and the results of simulated and real data demonstrate the validity of the proposed method.