Development of UWB microwave array radar for concealed weapon detection

This paper describes two approaches to short-range microwave imaging by means of ultra-wideband (UWB) technology. The first approach deals with synthetic aperture radar (SAR) that employs a transmit-receive antenna pair on mechanical scanner. The second one represents a multiple input multiple output (MIMO) antenna array that scans electronically in the horizontal plane and mechanically, installed on the scanner, in the vertical plane. The mechanical scanning in only one direction reduces significantly the measurement time. Two respective prototypes have been built and compared. Both systems comprise the same 10-18 GHz antennas and multichannel video impulse electronics while the same focusing based on Kirchhoff migration is applied to acquired data for radar imaging. The study has been carried out for an application of concealed weapon detection.