An efficient approach for near-field three-dimensional imaging radar

Linear array antennas (LAA) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) three-dimensional (3D) imaging has received a vibrant identification in recent years. This paper proposes a digital-beam forming (DBF)-based three-dimensional imaging algorithm for linear array antennas downward-looking synthetic aperture radar with single-transmitting and multiple-receiving (STMR) configuration. To establish the radar echo signal and to simplify the signal processing performance of imaging algorithm, equivalent phase centers are applied to simplify the range-history into monostatic configuration; then, parabola approximation is applied to decouple the three orthogonal variables which coupled to each other. Unlike traditional RMA 3D imaging algorithm imaging the scenario point to point, algorithm proposed by this paper processes the image in batch regardless the location of targets as 2D range-Doppler Algorithm does. Finally, we carried out the simulation and analysis on phase error to validate the feasibility of this algorithm.