In this paper, the problem of microwave imaging of rotating objects is appr
oached from a digital signal processing point of view, Attention is focused
on the reconstruction of the two-dimensional (2-D) image of an object obta
ined by processing complex samples of the continuous wave (CW) signal retur
n received for different object aspect angles covering a 2 pi total variati
on, The effects of a polar sampling of the Fourier transform (FT) of the ta
rget reflectivity function on the impulse response of the imaging system ar
e analyzed, A criterion for the choice of the angular sampling interval in
order to control the image blurring is given,
Finally, a new and fast digital signal processing method for image reconstr
uction is proposed. This method reconstructs high resolution images of rota
ting targets illuminated by a CW electromagnetic signal or by a large bandw
idth transmitted signal, This algorithm is suitable for processing wideband
received signal of targets observed for a large variation of the viewing a
ngle, so it is very attractive for the reconstruction of very high spatial
resolution target images in SAR/ISAR systems,
To show the performance of the method we finally present and discuss the re
sults obtained by applying the proposed technique on simulated and experime
ntal data.