SAR imaging with a hand-held UWB radar system

Abstract: Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems are used extensively for imaging vast areas using electromagnetic radiation. Radar systems have the benefit of being able to image areas which optical light cannot pass through, which makes them suitable for surveillance and weather monitoring, or monitoring through difficult atmospheric conditions. This thesis investigates, based on simulation and real data, whether a hand-held radar utilizing gaussian monopulses can function as a synthetic aperture radar device, by employing standard SAR focusing and filtering algorithms. The implementation of SAR algorithms was verified by a simulation and processing program written in the C programming language, and includes a novel algorithm for simulating raw SAR data. The novel algorithm was verified by inspecting the pulse-compressed and Global Backprojection (GBP)-focused image and its two-dimensional spectrum, and compared and contrasted to images generated in standard fashion. Handheld radar measurements of corner reflectors and a large reflecting sphere processed by GBP indicated that additional pre-processing is needed for focusing to work. Pre-processing the radar data by employing a rolling calculation of background noise and its subtraction yielded filtered raw data of sufficient quality to enable azimuth focusing with GBP. In conclusion this thesis has shown the new radar imaging algorithm to work in conjunction with standard SAR processing steps if its projecting nature can be tolerated. In addition GBP has been found to be a viable algorithm for accomplishing azimuth focusing of background-filtered radar data from a handheld pulsed radar system, and that the radar system in question may be used to perform SAR imaging.