Terahertz Wide-Angle Imaging and Analysis on Plane-wave Criteria Based on Inverse Synthetic Aperture Techniques

This paper presents two parts of work around terahertz imaging applications. The first part aims at solving the problems occurred with the increasing of the rotation angle. To compensate for the nonlinearity of terahertz radar systems, a calibration signal acquired from a bright target is always used. Generally, this compensation inserts an extra linear phase term in the intermediate frequency (IF) echo signal which is not expected in large-rotation angle imaging applications. We carried out a detailed theoretical analysis on this problem, and a minimum entropy criterion was employed to estimate and compensate for the linear-phase errors. In the second part, the effects of spherical wave on terahertz inverse synthetic aperture imaging are analyzed. Analytic criteria of plane-wave approximation were derived in the cases of different rotation angles. Experimental results of corner reflectors and an aircraft model based on a 330-GHz linear frequency-modulated continuous wave (LFMCW) radar system validated the necessity and effectiveness of the proposed compensation. By comparing the experimental images obtained under plane-wave assumption and spherical-wave correction, it also showed to be highly consistent with the analytic criteria we derived.