Toward Space–Time Incoherent Transmitter Design for Millimeter-Wave Imaging

It has been recently demonstrated that microwave and millimeter-wave imagery can be obtained using multiple noise transmitters to illuminate the scene with incoherent space-time-varying fields and a sparse receiving interferometric array. Incoherent imaging has a number of benefits compared to coherent imaging, including no required synchronization between the transmitters and receivers, and fast processing that does not require solving an inverse problem. In this letter, we present a method for characterizing the spatial incoherence of the transmitted signals in an incoherent millimeter-wave imager. We demonstrate theoretically, and experimentally, the characterization of the transmitted radiation spatial coherence as a function of number of noise transmitters in a 37 GHz imaging system.