Efficient translational motion compensation for micro-doppler extraction of ballistic missiles

Abstract

When the micro-Doppler (MD) image of a ballistic missile is derived, the translational motion compensation (TMC) method is usually applied to the inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) image, but yields poor results because of the micromotion of the ballistic missile. This paper proposes an efficient TMC method to obtain a focused MD image of a ballistic missile engaged in complicated micro-motion. During range alignment, range profiles (RPs) are coarsely aligned by using the 1D entropy cost function of RPs as a mark, then the coarsely-aligned RPs are fine-aligned by using the minimum 2D entropy of the MD image. During phase adjustment, the gradient of the phase error is appropriately weighted and added to the previous phase error to further fine-tune the aligned RPs. In simulations using the point scatterer model and the measured data from the real missile model, the proposed method provided better image focus than the existing method. ? The Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences.