Super-resolution ISAR imaging of maritime targets using PAMIR data

The airborne system PAMIR is able to acquire inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) data for imaging of moving targets with very high range resolution. This paper presents the processing chain applied on PAMIR data for well-focused Inverse SAR (ISAR) image generation of ships, for the first time. Particularly, super-resolution spectral analysis, as Capon's minimum-variance method (MVM), has been performed for image resolution enhancement. The constraints of this method on the input data size have been overcome using data chipping and mosaicking.