Near Field 3-D Millimeter-Wave SAR Image Enhancement and Detection with Application of Antenna Pattern Compensation

In this paper, a novel near-field high-resolution image focusing technique is proposed. With the emergence of Millimeter-wave (mmWave) devices, near-field synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging is widely used in automotive-mounted SAR imaging, UAV imaging, concealed threat detection, etc. Current research is mainly confined to the laboratory environment, thus ignoring the adverse effects of the non-ideal experimental environment on imaging and subsequent detection in real scenarios. To address this problem, we propose an optimized Back-Projection Algorithm (BPA) that considers the loss path of signal propagation among space by converting the amplitude factor in the echo model into a beam-weighting. The proposed algorithm is an image focusing algorithm for arbitrary and irregular arrays, and effectively mitigates sparse array imaging ghosts. We apply the 3DRIED dataset to construct image datasets for target detection, comparing the kappa coefficients of the proposed scheme with those obtained from classic BPA and Range Migration Algorithm (RMA) with amplitude loss compensation. The results show that the proposed algorithm attains a high-fidelity image reconstruction focus.