Motion compensation is a key and difficult step in inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) . The calibration of initial phase errors, which is well known as autofocus, requires very high precision, so it determines the quality of the reconstructed image to a great extent. A new autofocus method called the local dominant scatterer synthesis (LDSS) is presented. It has the capability to sufficiently reduce the errors induced by clutter and noise, and the advantage of having wide applications. Experiments of real measured data have shown its effectiveness.