For micromotion scatterers with small rotating radii, the micro-Doppler (m-D) effect interferes with cross-range compression in inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imaging and leads to a blurred main body image. In this paper, a novel method is proposed to remove the m-D effect by promoting the joint sparsity in the time-frequency domain. Firstly, to obtain the time-frequency representations of the limited measurements, the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) was modelled by an underdetermined equation. Then, a new objective function was used to measure the joint sparsity of the STFT entries so that the joint sparse recovery problem could be formulated as a constrained minimization problem. Similar to the smoothed l 0 (SL0) algorithm, a steepest descend approach was used to minimize the new objective function, where the projection step was tailored to make it suitable for m-D effect removal. Finally, we utilized the recovered STFT entries to obtain the main body echoes, based on which cross-range compression could be realized without m-D interference. After all contaminated range cells were processed by the proposed method, a clear main body image could be achieved. Experiments using both the point-scattering model and electromagnetic (EM) computation validated the performance of the proposed method.
Keywords: inverse synthetic aperture radar imaging; joint sparsity; micro-Doppler effect; short time Fourier transform; time-frequency domain.