By means of advantages of both SAR and lidar, the combination of the techniques of (inverse) synthetic aperture and lidar makes it possible to obtain high resolution 2-D image. In this paper, an indoor experimental system of inverse synthetic aperture lidar imaging is given and a processing approach is presented. The given system is in the mode of lidar system with separated receiver and transmitter, which can effectively eliminate the jamming from the lens or/and the intersection between two optic fibers. Based on the reference channel techniques, a method for the compensation of nonlinear frequency in the time domain is presented, which can solve the problem of nonlinear frequency efficiently. Then, with the mature inverse synthetic aperture algorithm, an image of inverse synthetic aperture lidar can be obtained, which is the first attempt in China. Finally, experimental results confirm the validity of the presented method and the feasibility of the experimental system. idar, synthetic aperture, range profile, phase error, imaging of rotating objects