Characterizing surface profiles utilizing mm-wave FMCW SAR imaging

In this paper the results from characterizing complex surface profiles with a synthetic aperture radar operating at frequencies up to approx. 250 GHz are presented. The radar uses a bandwidth of 38GHz and a maximum synthetic aperture of 40 cm times 40 cm and is thus rectangular and uniformly sampled. A fast parallel backprojection algorithm that can be used with general purpose GPUs is used for image reconstruction. The performance of the measurement system is evaluated with respect to the range- and cross-range-resolution as well as the overall measurement error on a given reference surface. Also the measurement performance on sharp edges is considered.