Rotational Motion Compensation for ISAR Imaging Based on Minimizing the Residual Norm

In inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) systems, image quality often suffers from the non-uniform rotation of non-cooperative targets. Rotational motion compensation (RMC) is necessary to perform refocused ISAR imaging via estimated rotational motion parameters. However, estimation errors tend to accumulate with the estimated processes, deteriorating the image quality. A novel RMC algorithm is proposed in this study to mitigate the impact of cumulative errors. The proposed method uses an iterative approach based on a novel criterion, i.e., the minimum residual norm of the signal phases, to estimate different rotational parameters independently to avoid the issue caused by cumulative errors. First, a refined inverse function combined with interpolation is proposed to perform the RMC procedure. Then, the rotation parameters are estimated using an iterative procedure designed to minimize the residual norm of the compensated signal phases. Finally, with the estimated parameters, RMC is performed on signals in all range bins, and focused images are obtained using the Fourier transform. Furthermore, this study utilizes simulated and real data to validate and evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm shows dominance in the aspects of estimation accuracy, entropy values, and focusing characteristics.