Phaseless Synthetic Aperture Radar With Efficient Sampling for Broadband Near-Field Imaging: Theory and Validation

This paper presents a broadband and phaseless synthetic aperture radar (SAR) with efficient sampling. The design relies on a novel phaseless monostatic element comprising a transmitter and a receiver. This element, together with a computationally inexpensive algorithm, can retrieve the phase of the monostatic scattered field at all the working band except for two small safety margins at the lower and upper frequencies. Furthermore, the phase retrieval works independently of the transmitter/receiver position. Consequently, conventional approaches to reduce the number of monostatic acquisition points can be employed. Thus, the proposed strategy is suitable to implement either arrays that benefit from a reduced number of low-complexity elements or raster scan systems that benefit not only from the cost reduction of the scanning components but also from a remarkable speed-up due to the reduced number of acquisition points. Moreover, in contrast to other off-axis schemes, the proposed system does not require neither mechanical nor electrical phase shifting and, therefore, it can be directly adapted to a large number of frequency bands. The performance of the system is validated by simulation and measurement examples in the millimeter-wave band.