Single Channel Frequency-Diverse Computational Imaging System for Through-the-Wall Sensing

This article presents a through-the-wall computational imaging (CI) system employing frequency-diverse antennas. CI has emerged as a promising alternative to conventional radar imaging systems [such as those based on synthetic aperture radar (SAR)] since they allow to significantly reduce the acquisition time and the hardware complexity. CI relies on using compressive antennas, radiating quasi-orthogonal radiation patterns, to compress the scene information into a single channel (or a reduced number of them). The feasibility of performing through-the-wall sensing employing frequency-diverse antennas is demonstrated for the first time in this work. Furthermore, a method to account for the propagation through the wall, which helps to increase the quality of the reconstructed images, is also proposed. Measurement results show that the system can successfully image targets hidden behind a wall with only a single standalone acquisition, thus drastically reducing the inspection time.