Smoothed Lv Distribution Based Three-Dimensional Imaging for Spinning Space Debris

Three-dimensional (3-D) imaging plays a vital role in the recognition of spinning space debris. However, the image may be blurred due to the range migration caused by fast rotation of space debris. Moreover, the image quality, which depends on the estimation accuracy of Doppler frequency and chirp rate of scattering centers, is influenced by cross-terms and sidelobes. In this article, we propose a novel 3-D imaging method based on smoothed Lv distribution (SLVD). Firstly, the selection criterion for best imaging time based on the time–frequency moment is proposed to guarantee that the echo is approximated as a linear frequency modulation (LFM) signal. Then, we operate the Khatri–Rao product on the centroid frequency and chirp rate (CFCR) representation and the range-Doppler (RD) image to obtain the 3-D image. To decrease the influence of range migration, we process a short time window during the RD imaging procedure. For cross-term and sidelobe suppression, the SLVD is proposed to obtain the CFCR representation by expressing the Lv distribution (LVD) in a convolution form and introducing a centroid frequency window. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed imaging method and the good performance of the proposed SLVD for cross-term and sidelobe suppression.