Abstract-This research introduces compressed sensing (CS) principle into inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imaging of nonuniform rotation targets, and high azimuth resolution can be achieved with limited number of pulses. Firstly, the sparsity of the echoed signal of radar targets with non-uniform rotation in certain matching Fourier domain is analyzed. Then the restricted isometry property (RIP) and incoherence of partial matching Fourier matrices are checked, following which an ISAR imaging method based on CS for both random sparse aperture and short aperture cases is proposed. In particular, considering the dependence of the sparse dictionary on the relative rotation parameter, a parameter estimation method by the optimal search in fractional Fourier domain is presented. Simulation experiments verify the effectiveness as well as superiority of the proposed imaging method over traditional methods in terms of imaging performance.

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