Utilization of SAR Backprojection in the Analysis of Downscaled Structures in the D-frequency Band

The use of THz frequencies for radar remote sensing has provided a new set of applications, where short-range sensing for high-resolution imaging can be used. At the same time, radar imaging of physically large objects for understanding their radar signatures, which is based on long-range remote sensing, can be a cumbersome process and require significant financial resources. In this paper, we propose to explore the synthetic-aperture-radar (SAR) concept at sub-THz frequencies to scale a real-life scenario of long-range imaging of foreign objects down to short-range sensing in the indoor environment. The idea is experimentally studied on four downscaled marine vessels, where the SAR imaging system is based on a D-band FMCW radar that operates at frequencies 126–182 GHz, and the global backprojection algorithm with modified linear interpolator is used for the SAR scene reconstruction. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed idea.