Modified Kirchhoff Migration for UWB MIMO Array-Based Radar Imaging

Abstract

In this paper, the formulation of Kirchhoff migration is modified for multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) array-based radar imaging in both free-space and subsurface scenarios. By applying the Kirchhoff integral to the multistatic data acquisition, the integral expression for the MIMO imaging is explicitly derived. Inclusion of the Snell's law and the Fresnel's equations into the integral formulation further expends the migration technique to subsurface imaging. A modification of the technique for strongly offset targets is proposed as well. The developed migration techniques are able to perform imaging with arbitrary MIMO configurations, which allow further exploration of the benefits of various array topologies. The proposed algorithms are compared with conventional diffraction stack migration on free-space synthetic data and experimentally validated by ground-penetrating radar experiments in subsurface scenarios. The results show that the modified Kirchhoff migration is superior over the conventional diffraction stack migration in the aspects of resolution, side-lobe level, clutter rejection ratio, and the ability to reconstruct shapes of distributed targets.