A novel low-profile portable radar system for high resolution through-wall radar imaging

An UWB through-wall imaging system is proposed based on a planar aperture array operating from 0.9 GHz to 2.3 GHz. The goal is to provide a light weight, fixed array to serve as an alternative to synthetic aperture radars (SAR) which rely on a precisely controlled moving antenna while collecting data. UWB capability is realized by the suppression of array grating lobes via the introduction of virtual phase centers interwoven within actual array phase centers. It is shown that the proposed system enables high resolution 3-D imaging via a non-coherent process. Specifically, several coherent images are forged from various fixed aperture locations (referred to as “snapshot” locations) and are appropriately combined to create a composite (fused) scene image. The design of the array and data collection system is described, and several images based upon backprojection and orthogonal-CLEAN algorithms are presented to demonstrate functionality.