Real-time reconstruction of three-dimensional cylindrical near-field radar images using a single instruction multiple data interpolation approach

During the last decade, radar imaging has been used in near-field scenarios where a cylindrical scan geometry is required to properly illuminate the scan region, such as breast microwave radar imaging and microwave wood inspection. Nevertheless, current cylindrical near-field radar image formation algorithms are not fast enough to provide the throughput required by these novel applications. A real-time wavefront reconstruction approach for the formation of three-dimensional cylindrical near-field radar images is proposed in this study. This technique parallelises the mapping procedures during the reconstruction process in order to increase its computational efficiency. To further reduce the execution time of the proposed approach, it was implemented in a general purpose graphic processing unit in order to take advantage of the computing capabilities of this platform. The proposed method yielded accurate results when applied to simulated and experimental data sets and yielded speed improvements of two orders of magnitude compared to conventional cylindrical near-field radar reconstruction approaches.