Millimeter-Wave Imaging at 652 Frames per Second

Abstract

Millimeter-wave technology has the potential to revolutionize the field of electronic imaging due to its ability to generate images with high resolution through obscurants like fog and smoke or through materials such as garments and baggage. While millimeter-wave technology has become smaller and more commercially viable in recent years, existing millimeter-wave imaging approaches have been limited by image acquisition time, inhibiting their wide adoption. In this work, we demonstrate a new method of millimeter-wave imaging that uses the transmission of noise signals paired with an element-level 38 GHz digital receiving array to generate millimeter-wave imagery at 652 frames per second. Using a new parallel data acquisition and image formation approach, latencies were reduced by a factor of nearly 50 compared to the authors' prior work, yielding frame rates more than 26 times faster than any other reported millimeter-wave imaging system. Such imaging capability significantly expands the opportunities for millimeter-wave commercial and scientific imaging applications including contraband detection, consumer sensing, industrial imaging, and nondestructive evaluation. We discuss the millimeter-wave hardware architecture, the imaging algorithm, and present experimental high-speed millimeter-wave imagery.