ISAR Imaging using FFT with Polar Reformatting of Measured RCS

Abstract

Synthetic Aperture Radar uses radar movement for target identification and is commonly used in airborne radar systems for various applications such as oceanography, glaciology and military surveillance. On the contrary, for range-cross range profiling, Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar exploits the target motion and is employed in ground based radar systems. In this work, ISAR imaging of two stealth fighter aircraft models is performed by reformatting the scattered field data from a polar grid to a Cartesian grid using the nearest neighbor interpolation method. Although numerical noise generated by this interpolation is unavoidable, a comparison of experimental and simulation results shows that this method can be used for identification of major scattering centers on low observable targets.