ASAR-antenna synthetic aperture radar imaging

Abstract

The antenna synthetic aperture radar (ASAR) imaging concept is introduced. We present the ASAR imaging algorithm to pinpoint the locations of secondary scattering off a platform from antenna radiation data. It is shown that a three-dimensional (3-D) ASAR image of the platform can be formed by inverse Fourier transforming the multifrequency, multiaspect far-field radiation data from an antenna mounted on the platform. This concept is demonstrated using the computed radiation data from the code Apatch, which employs the shooting and bouncing ray (SBR) technique. Furthermore, we develop a fast ASAR algorithm specially tailored for the SBR approach. By taking advantage of the ray tracing information within the SBR engine, we demonstrate that the fast approach can result in the same quality of image as the frequency-aspect algorithm at only a fraction of the computation time.