Improvement of a Doppler-Radiometer Using a Sparse Array

A 2-D Doppler-radiometer has been proposed to improve the poor angular resolution of microwave radiometers, using aperture synthesis on a moving platform. In this letter, we investigate drawbacks of the Doppler-radiometer, which have not been discussed previously in detail. The imaging method is revised to be suitable for imaging of distributed sources, which is the more common situation than a point source, and then the specklelike sidelobes in the point source response are discussed. In distributed source imaging, the specklelike sidelobes in the point source response of the Doppler-radiometer severely degrade the imaging performance, so it is necessary to reduce them. The cause of specklelike sidelobes is discussed, and a sparse array is proposed to improve the imaging performance of the Doppler-radiometer. The improvement is demonstrated by simulation of the point source response, showing reduced speckle.