A Fast ISAR Tomography Technique for Fully Polarimetric 3-D Imaging of Man-Made Targets

Abstract

The 3-D inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) tomography is an enabling technique for applications such as the exact diagnosis of scattering mechanisms for complex targets. Nevertheless, current ISAR tomography solutions still suffer from problems such as the great computational complexity and optimal utilization of the signatures acquired from limited baselines. In this work, we propose a fast ISAR tomography technique for fully polarimetric 3-D imaging of man-made targets. A stack of 2-D complex-valued images with different baselines and polarizations is first obtained through a phase error calibration (PEC) process and graphic processing unit accelerated polarimetric filtered backprojection. A polarimetric state-space decomposition (P-SSD) algorithm is then developed which could provide joint 3-D reconstruction results with low computational complexity. Examples from both numerical multibaseline data for the Sandia laboratories implementation of cylinders (SLICY) benchmark model and the outdoor range dataset collected by the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) are presented to demonstrate the superior performance and the usefulness of the proposed technique.