High Resolution Through-the-Wall and Subsurface Imaging Using Small Number of Transceivers on Moving Robotic Platforms

Abstract:

Imaging of visually obscured objects within the buildings or buried under ground using low frequency EM waves have many military, security, civilian, and industrial applications. In certain applications such as detection of targets inside the buildings and buried land mines and pipelines where the objects are closely spaced and/or located at far distance from the transmitter and receiver, the imaging system must have fine cross range resolution. Typically, this is achieved by using large array of directive antennas with limited field of view and low mobility.

In this research, new imaging methods based on synthetic aperture processing are presented to address low cross-range resolution, limited field of view, and low mobility of currently available through-the-wall and subsurface imaging systems. In the proposed methods, the large array of directive antennas is replaced by a few number of transceivers mounted on moving robots. By coherent processing of the scattered fields samples collected at different locations within the imaging area, a large 2-D array is synthesized for high resolution imaging while high mobility is maintained for the imaging system.

Bi-static radar systems including novel wideband antennas have been designed and fabricated to evaluate performance of the proposed methods in real scenarios.