Synthetic aperture interferometric imaging using a passive microwave coding device

There has been growing interest in the use of microwave synthetic aperture radiometers since their could solve the trade-off between the image resolution and the antennas aperture size. Compared to classical techniques, SAIR (Synthetic Aperture Interferometric Radiometer) can reach a large field of view (FOV) and high imaging rate. Nevertheless, the architecture of a conventional radiometer still bulky and costly. In this paper, a passive combining technique is proposed to reduce the hardware complexity as well as the dimensional requirements of the receiving antennas. Experimental results are presented to highlight the effectiveness of the proposed technique.