Comparison between wavefront-based shape reconstruction and beamforming for UWB near-field imaging radar

This paper investigates the performances of a wavefront-based shape reconstruction algorithm, known as Envelope, for ultra-wideband (UWB) near-field imaging. In contrast with conventional beamforming, surface estimation is based on identification of wavefronts within the received data and direct transformation from delay time to the target shape. The algorithm is compared with conventional beamforming in terms of both imaging accuracy and speed. The influence of sparsity of data acquisition on the estimated surface image is further compared showing both advantage and problems of the methods.