Experimental Results of Local Backprojection for Monostatic THz SAR Imaging

The use of THz frequencies has enabled the opportunity to perform synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) imaging at the sub-mm level. It is of great interest for applications where high-resolution remote sensing in short range is required. However, with the increase of the operating frequencies from microwave to THz, the SAR image formation algorithms work with a larger amount of data and become more sensitive to phase errors that can be caused by insufficient signal sampling rate or physical factors that cause platform deviations. This motivates the use of fast image formation capable to handle phase errors. In this paper, we present the experimental results on the performance of the local backprojection (LBP) algorithm for processing THz SAR signals. The LBP algorithm has been tested with the real data in the frequency range 0.325–0.5 THz. The results demonstrate the efficiency of the LBP algorithm for the SAR scene reconstruction and highlight the necessity of the use of two times higher signal upsampling to achieve reconstruction accuracy similar to the global backprojection algorithm.