An Effective Approach for Data Extraction from Antenna Polar Patterns

Despite technology advances in the field of antenna evaluating and measurement, some countries still suffer from the lack of modern antenna laboratories. The old measurement tools do not provide digital outputs and only produce a plotted polar pattern which is incompatible with today´s simulation environments. Moreover, upgrading old measurement devices using suitable hardware is rather expensive. Current research is directed towards the development of an effective image processing algorithm that inputs the antenna polar patterns, traces the boundary, down samples the traced pixels and produces the magnitude and angle information in a software compatible format. The average achieved accuracy is 92.68%. More numerical results are reported in the paper.