Abstract: Rotational phase component (RPC) of target’s prominent scattering canters may deteriorate the performance of Doppler centroid tracking (DCT) method. The non-coherent property of pulses sampled after STRETCH processing and the coherence feature of pulses sampled directly in intermediate frequency (IF) is firstly analyzed. Then by using this property, the coherent DCT phase compensation method is developed in this paper. On the basis of DCT method, the proposed approach improves the translational phase component (TPC) estimation accuracy and improves the quality of ISAR image. Compared to the modified Doppler centroid tracking (MDCT) algorithm, the proposed method achieves better phase compensation performance. Experimental results prove the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.