CROSS RANGE STREAKS IN ISAR IMAGES GENERATED VIA THE SHOOTING-AND-BOUNCING RAY TECHNIQUE - CAUSE AND SOLUTIONS

The low-level ''cross-range streaks,'' observed in the ISAR images gen erated by the shooting-and-bouncing ray technique, are investigated. T he streaks arise due to angular-scintillation noise in the Xpatch data , and such scintillation occurs due to the finite discretization of th e rat-shooting grid. We propose two solutions to solve the streaking p roblem. The first solution uses spatial averaging to filter out the an gular-scintillation noise. The second solution uses the multi-angle si gnature-extrapolation algorithm to generate the frequency-aspect scatt ered-field data. The performance and computational efficiency of these solutions are analyzed and presented.