ISAR based technique for refocusing non-cooperative targets in SAR images

Non-cooperative moving targets typically appear defocused in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images as they are non-stationary during the coherent processing interval. Typically, the problem of refocusing moving targets in SAR scenes is addressed as a problem of the target's motion estimation and compensation. In this study, the problem is addressed as a problem of non-cooperative target imaging and the authors propose a solution based on the use of inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) processing to solve this problem. Taking into consideration the advantages of SAR processing, the problem is tackled starting from formed SAR images, where non-cooperative targets images are firstly detected, then backprojected to the received data domain and reprocessed as ISAR data. The effectiveness of the proposed method is then tested on Cosmo-Skymed spotlight SAR data of maritime targets.