Inexpensive SAR testbed for 3D mmWave imaging applications

Abstract

In this paper, the authors investigate and develop a low-cost synthetic aperture radar (SAR) testbed and utilise it to capture and reconstruct high-resolution 3D mmWave SAR images. Despite much attention from both industrial and academic scholars, cost restraints and complexity have hindered the deployment of SAR systems, particularly in the mmWave domain. This paper outlines the major components and systems of the 3D SAR testbed. The authors build a testbed with low-cost, commercially available hardware components and include open-source software that is highly reconfigurable and simple to reproduce. The multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar sensor uses a frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) chirp at the V-band (40–75 GHz) and synthesises a rectilinear two-dimensional planar aperture. The authors presented several reconstructed 3D images imitating real-world scenarios using the testbed. A non-linear sampling technique that has significantly decreased the amount of time required for data acquisition was implemented. In addition, the authors employed multiple image quality metrics to quantify and compare the images produced by the testbed. The testbed can be used to test and validate new techniques and algorithms.