Experimental Demonstration and Calibration of a 16-Element Active Incoherent Millimeter-Wave Imaging Array

In this article, an active incoherent millimeter-wave imaging array is presented, along with its calibration procedure. Active incoherent millimeter-wave imaging uses the transmission of incoherent signals from multiple transmitters to mimic the properties of thermal radiation, enabling interferomet...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on microwave theory and techniques 2020-09, Vol.68 (9), p.3804-3813
Main Authors: Vakalis, Stavros, Gong, Liang, He, Yuxiao, Papapolymerou, John, Nanzer, Jeffrey A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Antenna arrays
Calibration
distributed arrays
Hardware
Image reconstruction
Imaging
incoherent imaging
interferometric imaging
Millimeter wave radar
Millimeter waves
millimeter-wave imaging
noise radar
Passive imaging
Passive millimeter wave imaging
Radar imaging
redundancy
Thermal radiation
Transmitters
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Summary:In this article, an active incoherent millimeter-wave imaging array is presented, along with its calibration procedure. Active incoherent millimeter-wave imaging uses the transmission of incoherent signals from multiple transmitters to mimic the properties of thermal radiation, enabling interferometric image reconstruction that can be realized in a snap-shot mode, without beamsteering. Due to the use of transmitters, the sensitivity requirement on the receivers is significantly relaxed compared with passive millimeter-wave imaging systems that detect low-power thermal radiation, making it possible to use standard commercial hardware, therefore decreasing the cost considerably. No exact knowledge of the transmit illumination is needed; thus, the coordination of the transmitters is minimal, further simplifying the system implementation. In this work, a 16-element K_{a} -band millimeter-wave imager is built and presented using commercial components and in-house fabricated antennas, along with a calibration procedure to account for amplitude and phase variations in the hardware. Experimental 2-D snapshot image reconstructions are presented.
ISSN:0018-9480
1557-9670
DOI:10.1109/TMTT.2020.2986413