Near range polarimetric SAR for non-destructive inspection of wooden buildings

Abstract

We report our recent development in near rage radar systems and their applications to Non Destructive Inspection (NDI) for wooden buildings. We developed a radar system having 32 linearly aligned antenna elements operating at 10-20GHz. This system can acquire quite dense data on a wall. Then we discuss the possibility of 2-dimentional array system, based on the idea of sparse array. We demonstrated that the 8-ch array radar system can visualize the 3-dimentional structure without movement for radar scanning. Then we demonstrate that polarimetric information can image very small structure of buildings, which is under the limitation of radar resolution.