Near field image reconstruction algorithm for passive millimeter-wave imager BHU-2D-U

A passive millimeter-wave imager BHU-2D-U based on synthetic aperture interferometric radiometer (SAIR) technique has been developed by Beihang University. The imager is designed for detecting concealed weapons on human body and operated under the near-field condition of the antenna array, thus the conventional Fourier imaging theory does not apply. In this paper, an accurate numerical image reconstruction algorithm using regularization theory is proposed. By means of adding a prior information of desired brightness temperature image, the influences of measurement noise and focusing error on the reconstructed image have been reduced. Numerical simulations and experiments on BHU-2D-U have been performed to verify the superiorities of the proposed algorithm over the corrected Fourier method and the Moore-Penrose pseudo inverse method. The results demonstrate that the proposed method is an advantageous imaging algorithm for near-field millimeter-wave SAIR.