A Novel MIMO ArcSAR Imaging System for FOD Detection

In this article, a multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) arc synthetic aperture radar (ArcSAR) scheme for the detection of foreign object debris (FOD) located in an airport runway is proposed. In the proposed system, in order to overcome the problem of the large computational cost of the traditional wavenumber domain ArcSAR imaging method, an improved ArcSAR algorithm named segmentwise matched filtering (SWMF) is proposed to reduce the number of matched filters. Furthermore, to utilize the energy accumulation performance of multichannels in a monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC), an MIMO-ArcSAR scheme is developed. In the MIMO-ArcSAR system, the multichannel phase compensation is performed to achieve coherent accumulation. To verify the performance of the proposed technology, an FOD detection radar system based on a low-cost MMIC chip is implemented. Simulation and real-data results show that the proposed method performs well in FOD detection.