Passive millimeter-wave camera with interferometric processing

Abstract

A proto-type passive millimeter-wave (MMW) camera with interferometric processing has been developed and evaluated to confirm the feasibility of the interferometric MMW camera and to study the characteristics of MMW images.This proto-type camera is comprised of the minimum configuration as an interferometric imager which consists of two sets of a W-band receiver with a horn antenna, and a digital processing unit. The position of these two antennas with W-band front-end moves on the precision linear slider in horizontal and vertical axis. The coherently amplified two channel signals are digitized and processed in the hardware processor. The process is comprised of correlation of all combination of each axis data, and integration to improve the signal to noise ratio. The integrated data is processed to make an image by matched filter processing. The integration time is from 1mS to 10S depending on required integration gain. The maximum synthesized antenna aperture size is 1m for horizontal axis and 50cm for vertical axis. In this paper, the evaluation of the proto-type P-MMW camera is descried. After the evaluation, some improvement was scheduled and conducted. Also, future plan for a real-time camera using this technique is presented .