Inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imaging for maneuvering targets suffers from a Doppler frequency time-varying problem, leading to the ISAR images blurred in the azimuth direction. Given that the traditional imaging methods have poor imaging performance or low efficiency, and the existing deep learning imaging methods cannot effectively reconstruct the deblurred ISAR images retaining rich details and textures, an unblurring ISAR imaging method based on an advanced Transformer structure for maneuvering targets is proposed. We first present a pseudo-measured data generation method based on the DeepLabv3+ network and Diamond-Square algorithm to acquire an ISAR dataset for training with good generalization to measured data. Next, with the locally-enhanced window Transformer block adopted to enhance the ability to capture local context as well as global dependencies, we construct a novel Uformer-based GAN (UFGAN) to restore the deblurred ISAR images with rich details and textures from blurred imaging results. The simulation and measured experiments show that the proposed method can achieve fast and high-quality imaging for maneuvering targets under the condition of a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and sparse aperture.

The traditional inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imaging uses matched filtering and pulse accumulation methods. When improving the resolution and real-time performance, there are some problems, such as the high sampling rate and large amount of data. Although the compressed sensing (CS) method can realize high-resolution imaging with small sampling data, the sparse reconstruction algorithm has high computational complexity and is time-consuming. The imaging result is limited by the model and sparsity hypothesis. We propose a novel CS-ISAR imaging method using an attention generative adversarial network (AGAN). The generator of AGAN is a modified U-net consisting of both spatial and channel-wise attention. The trained generator can learn the imaging operation from down-sampling data to high-resolution ISAR images. Simulations and measured data experiments are given to validate the advantage of the proposed method.