One microwave imaging system based on automotive radar chip

The interest in microwave imaging system is increasing because it can serve as a useful tool for concealed threat detecting. The current imaging systems have two major challenges: (i) multi‐static arrays suffer from complex hardware design and ineffective backprojection‐imaging algorithm, and (ii) monostatic linear arrays suffer from large scanning time due to the electronically scanning one by one of the co‐located receive–transmit antennas. To address these challenges, this study introduces a novel linear imaging array based on automotive radar chips and sub‐array time‐division multiple‐input multiple‐output working principles, which is hardware efficient and compatible fast Fourier transform (FFT) imaging technique. Through simulation, it is shown that the scanning time is only one‐fourth of the traditional monostatic linear array and the FFT image reconstruction technique can be used.