Indirect Microwave Holography and Through Wall Imaging

In this paper, a review of indirect microwave holography for through-wall imaging is presented. Indirect microwave holography is an imaging technique, enabling the complex object scattered field scattered to be recovered from intensity-only, scalar microwave measurements by removing the requirement of using expensive vector measurement equipment. This significantly reduces the cost of the imaging system and simplifies the hardware implementation. The application of a back-propagation algorithm enables the reconstructed amplitude and phase images to be obtained at the plane of the concealed object. Experimental work is carried out on a metallic gun concealed under a 5 cm thick plywood wall and it is demonstrated that the indirect microwave holographic TWI can produce good resolution amplitude and phase images when back-propagation is applied. TWI of a concealed dielectric box representing non-metallic ordnance is also performed to demonstrate the ability of the technique to reconstruct through-the-wall images of concealed dielectric objects. An investigation of the resolution characteristics of the system suggests diffraction limited resolution is achieved.