Photonics-Based High-Resolution 3D Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar Imaging

Abstract

A photonics-based radar for high-resolution 3D microwave imaging is proposed and demonstrated, in which high range resolution is achieved by employing a wideband linearly frequency modulated signal, and high cross-range resolution in both azimuth and elevation is realized by rotating the target around two orthogonal axes to compose a 2D inverse synthetic aperture. The proposed radar performs photonics-based in-phase/quadrature up-conversion and de-chirp processing in the transmitter and receiver, respectively, which features a compact structure with low-sampling-rate electronics in the receiver. An experiment is carried out. The established radar works in the <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$K$ </tex-math></inline-formula> -band, with bandwidth as large as 8 GHz. Captured echo signals at different rotation angles of the target are processed to a 3D image, in which the voxel values are scattering intensities at different spatial positions.