The effect of roll, pitch and yaw motions on ISAR imaging

In this paper, we analyze the effect of roll, pitch and yaw rotations on inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imaging. An ideal ISAR image of a target with regular motion can be derived from the image projection plane and the radar line-of-sight (LOS) unit vector. Roll, pitch and yaw rotations induce time-varying Doppler shifts that can be analyzed through the rotation matrix and the effective rotation vector. We simulated the process of ISAR imaging of a rotating target. Thus, the effect of rotational motion on ISAR imaging can be observed, and the effect of individual rotation components can be studied separately. For a target with regular motion, perturbations of roll and pitch motions may make image blurring if conventional motion compensation is used. Advanced motion compensation algorithms that compensate the perturbations may improve the image.