A Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR)-Based Technique for Microwave Imaging and Material Characterization

Abstract

This contribution presents a simple and fast Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR)-based technique for microwave imaging and material characterization from microwave measurements acquired in tomographic systems. SAR backpropagation is one of the simplest and fastest techniques for microwave imaging. However, in the case of heterogeneous objects and media, a priori information about the constitutive parameters (conductivity, permittivity) is needed for an accurate imaging. In some cases, a first guess of the constitutive parameters can be extracted from an uncorrected SAR image, and then the estimated parameters can be introduced in a second step to correct the SAR image. The main advantage of this methodology is that there is little or no need for a priori information about the object to be imaged. Besides, calculation time is not significantly increased with respect to conventional SAR, thus allowing real-time imaging capabilities. The methodology has been validated by means of measurements acquired in a cylindrical setup.