A hybrid microwave imaging scheme based on synthetic aperture system and wavefront modulation

The core problem of microwave imaging is to acquire high azimuth resolution. The universal solution is synthetic aperture radar (SAR) utilizing the relative movement between radar and target scene. Recently some researchers propose a novel imaging scheme called microwave staring imaging for motionless platform based on wavefront modulation in azimuth. However, it´s not suitable for lowspeed platform to adopt synthetic aperture system because of long revisiting period or imaging time. In addition, the microwave imaging scheme requires vast uncorrelated wavefronts for a large scene. On the other hand, we demonstrate that SAR can acquire azimuth resolution by solving equations in the same way as microwave staring imaging. Thus, this paper proposed a hybrid microwave imaging scheme based on synthetic aperture system and wavefront modulation for low-speed platform to overcome the above shortcomings. In the proposed imaging scheme, an observation matrix containing the information of wavefont modulation and azimuth phase history of SAR is constructed to obtain high azimuth resolution. Experimental tests demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid microwave imaging scheme.