Multi-view Three-Dimensional Interferometric Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar

Three-dimensional (3D) ISAR imaging has been proven feasible by combining traditional ISAR imaging and interferometry. Such technique, namely Inteferometric ISAR (InISAR), allows for the main target scattering centres to be mapped into a 3D spatial domain, therefore forming 3D images under the form of 3D point clouds. 3D InISAR overcomes some main limitations of traditional 2D ISAR imaging, such as the problem of cross-range scaling and unknown image projection plane (IPP). Despite the great advantage of 3D imaging over traditional 2D imaging, some issues remain, such as scatterer scintillation, shadowing effects, poor SNR, etc., which limit the effectiveness of 3D imaging. A solution to these issues can be found in the use of multiple 3D views, which can be obtained exploiting either multi-temporal or multi-perspective configurations or a combination of both. This paper propose this concept and develops the image fusion algorithms that are necessary to produce multi-view 3D ISAR images. The effectiveness of the proposed technique is tested by using real data collected with a multi-static InISAR system.