An imaging technique using confocal circular synthetic aperture radar

Abstract

This paper presents a theory and its experimental demonstration of an imaging technique based on three-dimensional (3D) space-time confocal imaging and circular synthetic aperture radar (SAR). The theory is an extension of the conventional straight-path SAR-to-SAR on an arbitrary curved path. Next, a general formulation for the curved SAR is applied to circular SAR geometry, which has two important features. First, it allows the maximum attainable resolution to be an the order of a wavelength. Second, it makes 3D confocal imaging possible, X-band (7-13 GHz) imaging experiments are conducted to demonstrate this technique.