High-resolution ISAR imaging of maneuvering targets based on the sparse representation of multiple column-sparse vectors

For inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imaging of a maneuvering target, the time-variance of Doppler shifts will produce blurred images over a long coherent processing interval (CPI). Compressed sensing (CS) theory indicates that the precise recovery of an unknown sparse signal can be achieved from a very limited number of measurements. A novel sparse reconstruction of multiple column-sparse vectors using an algorithm with a minor reconstruction error and low computational complexity is proposed here based on multiple measurement vectors (MMV) and the smoothed ℓ0 norm (SL0) algorithm. For ISAR imaging of maneuvering targets, the Doppler shifts remain nearly constant for a short CPI. The proposed algorithm can produce high resolution ISAR images of maneuvering targets with an extremely limited number of pulses. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and computational efficiency of the proposed method.