A system-level simulator for indoor mmW SAR imaging and its applications

Recently, the research interest in indoor active millimeter wave (mmW) imaging by applying the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) technique is increasing. However, there is a lack of proper computer-aided design (CAD) tools at the system level, and almost all the R&D activities rely on experiments solely. The high cost of such a system stops many researchers from investigating such a fascinating research topic. Moreover, the experiment-oriented studies may blind the researchers to some details during the imaging process, since in most cases they are only interested in the readout from the receivers and do not know how the waves perform in reality. To bridge such a gap, we propose a modeling approach at mmW frequencies, which is able to simulate the physical process during SAR imaging. We are not going to discuss about advanced image reconstruction algorithms, since they have already been investigated intensively for decades. To distinguish from previous work, for the first time, we model the data acquisition process in a SAR imaging system successfully at mmW frequencies. We show how to perform some system-level studies based on such a simulator via a common PC, including the influence of reflectivity contrast between object and background, sampling step, and antenna's directivity on image quality. The simulator can serve system design purposes and it can be easily extended to THz frequencies. (C) 2012 Optical Society of America